New precognition study supports skeptical view

But an NDE doesn't have any advantage without physical resuscitation. In fact only very recently we see them more "frequently", which is an oxymoron, given the rarity of the phenomenon.
There are hundreds of types of crises that human beings face and have faced for millions of years and no similar preserving "mechanism" has ever showed up.
In fact you cannot mention one (that is analogous to NDEs).

Isn't there any other excuse you can make up, that would sound less ill-founded?
Compared to this the usual DMT + oxygen deprivation + some other mysterious brain activity sounds like a promising solution to the riddle...

I don't think the advantage has much to do with "resuscitation" but with the organism being in a risk state for which there is a certain chance of survival. All that resus has done, imo, is to widen that window a little further. Again, a few moments thought should have been sufficient to tell you this.
 
Okay, I take that back. But then what do you mean by "But an NDE doesn't have any advantage without physical resuscitation." if you think that resuscitation can occur naturally?
Maybe you haven't followed the exchange with Kai. I was not talking about a "natural" resuscitation.
One of the main reasons why we're able to collect more near death experiences and study them, is the very recent (late XXth century) medical advancements in resuscitation.
 
I don't think the advantage has much to do with "resuscitation" but with the organism being in a risk state for which there is a certain chance of survival. All that resus has done, imo, is to widen that window a little further.
But resuscitation IS fundamental!
If you don't come back to life the NDE is useless.

The mortality rate just a few hundreds years ago was orders of magnitude higher, not just for heart attack, but for any illness besides a cold.
Proposing NDEs as an evolutionary survival mechanism is nonsensical, because it never triggers in the vast majority of possible crises. If human kind had to rely on NDEs to survive "risk states" we would have disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Today people's lives are equally threatened by all sorts of health crises but we can survive most of them thanks to medical advancements. We have a huge amounts of "survivors" from accidents, infections, tumors, heart attacks, and whatnot and yet the NDE phenomenon remains extremely rare. More evidence that your hypothesis is plain silly.

To add more mystery some people have an ND (or ND-like) experience in non life-threatening situations. The only analogue to NDE are mystical experiences which don't even require an organism in "risk state" to get triggered.

It's an indefensible position.
And you keep sounding like one of those ideologues sworn to see everything as a product of natural selection.
 
Maybe you haven't followed the exchange with Kai. I was not talking about a "natural" resuscitation.
One of the main reasons why we're able to collect more near death experiences and study them, is the very recent (late XXth century) medical advancements in resuscitation.
But then why is the question of "physical resuscitation" an issue? If there is an advantage to natural resuscitation and that is why NDEs occur, then they come along for the ride when medical resuscitation is performed.

I'm tempted to believe that NDEs are simply an accident of our physiology, but who knows.

~~ Paul
 
But resuscitation IS fundamental!
If you don't come back to life the NDE is useless.
Why is this necessarily the case? It could be that the NDE has no purpose at all. It could also be that certain kinds of NDEs lead to a stronger fight against death and thus increased survival.

Whether an NDE is useless or not may have nothing to do with the post-NDE interpretation that we engage in.

~~ Paul
 
But resuscitation IS fundamental!
If you don't come back to life the NDE is useless.


Death risk is a spectrum, not a coordinate point, that's why "near death experiences" exist right the way across from simple experience of the fear of an oncoming threat through to cardiac arrest.

The mortality rate just a few hundreds years ago was orders of magnitude higher, not just for heart attack, but for any illness besides a cold.
Proposing NDEs as an evolutionary survival mechanism is nonsensical, because it never triggers in the vast majority of possible crises. If human kind had to rely on NDEs to survive "risk states" we would have disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Not true. Again, I tried to explain above that many evolutionary adaptations apply only to small portions of populations, especially adaptations in the ongoing process of evolving. The fact that mortality risk was higher for many things in the past gives such an adaptation a greater opportunity to take hold...not less.

Today people's lives are equally threatened by all sorts of health crises but we can survive most of them thanks to medical advancements. We have a huge amounts of "survivors" from accidents, infections, tumors, heart attacks, and whatnot and yet the NDE phenomenon remains extremely rare. More evidence that your hypothesis is plain silly.

These are not sound arguments. Yes, our ability to survive some kinds of medical crisis have improved. But humans have existed on the earth, in one form or another, for millions of years. What happens over a couple of hundred years, in terms of actual evolution, won't even register. The adaptation may have been set in place over hundreds of thousands of years.

To add more mystery some people have an ND (or ND-like) experience in non life-threatening situations. The only analogue to NDE are mystical experiences which don't even require an organism in "risk state" to get triggered.

See above. The organism can perceive a risk all the way from fear to cardiac arrest. One of the most likely stressors appears to be the risk of ischaemia.

It's an indefensible position.
And you keep sounding like one of those ideologues sworn to see everything as a product of natural selection.

It's not indefensible at all. It follows the pattern very strongly. Of course that alone does not render it true. However, you seem to have an ideological resistance to the exploration of possibilities alternative to the one you favor...which is a shame.
 
But then why is the question of "physical resuscitation" an issue? If there is an advantage to natural resuscitation and that is why NDEs occur, then they come along for the ride when medical resuscitation is performed.

Yes, I would say that captures the possibility in a nutshell. There is a risk-handling syndrome which is capable of "working" only a certain percentage of the time. Our own interventions (modestly) increase that percentage.
 
It's not indefensible at all. It follows the pattern very strongly. Of course that alone does not render it true. However, you seem to have an ideological resistance to the exploration of possibilities alternative to the one you favor...which is a shame.
Problem is you're offering a speculation that is neither verifiable nor falsifiable and that just rests on its own internal logic. Like a fairy tale.
Not to mention that it presupposes human behavior, such as spirituality and mysticism, must be originated from evolutionary adaptations, which typically slips into more unwarranted nonsense about the nature of consciousness and experience. (as secretions of the brain)

To quote Noam Chomsky on evolutionary psychology:

You find that people cooperate, you say, "Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’
You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's.
In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.

It is really funny how on one hand you are asking for strict and controlled scientific evidence regarding the mysterious features NDEs, and on the other hand you appeal to pseudo-science to explain it all away with one brush.

cheers
 
Why is this necessarily the case? It could be that the NDE has no purpose at all. It could also be that certain kinds of NDEs lead to a stronger fight against death and thus increased survival.
By using up critical energy for survival? :D
People who don't have an NDE would be at an advantage.
 
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Problem is you're offering a speculation that is neither verifiable nor falsifiable and that just rests on its own internal logic. Like a fairy tale.

Well, statements like this don't contain any content. I could say exactly the same thing about your remarks. The problem is that people seem to have this idea that the mind cannot be "tricking" them, or presenting them with something that is not literally what it appears to be, or presenting it with an agenda, the most likely orientation of which is physical survival. Physical survival is the most important thing to the organism. Almost everything about your body and mind, honed from the first unicellular creatures over billions of years, has been "about" that. If this is *not* about that, then frankly the burden of proof lies with that claim. I'm not even saying that NDEs *can't* have a relevance which is beyond survival...but at present, it's a case of "I'll believe that when I see it."

Not to mention that it presupposes human behavior, such as spirituality and mysticism, must be originated from evolutionary adaptations, which typically slips into more unwarranted nonsense about the nature of consciousness and experience. (as secretions of the brain)

Not sure why you conflate materialism with the existence of evolution. The two do not appear to me to be necessarily connected. The question is whether there is a discernible advantage in survival terms to having an NDE, and then asking onself whether NDEs fit the profile for such a survivial function. It appears to me that they do, including being mainly a reproductive-age phenomenon (very few elderly people have NDEs).

It is really funny how on one hand you are asking for strict and controlled scientific evidence regarding the mysterious features NDEs, and on the other hand you appeal to pseudo-science to explain it all away with one brush.

I don't appeal to pseudo-science, but to have that conversation you would first need to understand the difference between pseudoscience and science, which I am not convinced you do ;)

Basically, none of your "points" above really addressed my points. You'd rather tirade and deal in empty rhetoric. Fair enough. But that stuff isn't persuading me that NDEs can't be an evolutionary function nonetheless. It sure looks like one to me.
 
By using up critical energy for survival? :D
People who don't have an NDE would be at an advantage.

But if you are more likely to survive, then using your "energy" in that way (always assuming your idea that "energy" has much, if anything, to do with it...and I don't assume that) is the single MOST useful thing that you could do. There, that wasn't hard, was it!
 
I want to emphasize that I don't take the view, necessarily, that phenomena such as NDEs have nothing to tell us about consciousness and reality. Really, I am just against the "taking literally" of them, which I think is a kind of fundamentalism that verges towards being on a par with the taking-literally of the Bible. I think that's damaging to the intellect and inquiry.

I have for a long time felt that NDEs are a less radical and more "programmed" form of altered consciousness than the drug experiences of high-impact psychedelics, for instance. These seem to reset the "experienced reality function" in much more radical ways, imo, which in turn leads to an interesting ontological question as to why that is possible. For here we have "states of consciousness" so far from evolutionary equilibrium, that the purpose even of their bare possibility in a resource-driven, primate-adaptation brain consciousness is open to question, imo.

Specifically, it seems to me to suggest that the "panpsychist" take on the universe / universes might actually be true.
 
Strictly speaking none of this "proves" that such phenomena cannot exist, but it weakens their case I think, and it is highly improbable that there is *no* relation between the psychological benefit they offer and the "strength of evidence" people are inclined to see for them.
There is a skeptic quote that might be paraphrased here, "I don't care how much evidence you show me, I will never believe you."

Unless we are going to start going in to implications of some quantum intepretations, a person's belief in something does not create the reality or lack thereof. I suppose this study is neat as psychological trivia, though people's need for control and rationalization is not even associated with parapsychology. People will create their own rationalizations if they feel out of control, so it really gives no weight either way.

Let me guess - they scientifically compared their research to all other empirical published scientific research in precognition? What? They didn't?!! Shocking.

This is part of a rather unfortunate shell game, I think. The successful tests are censored from "big journals" and moved to otheres like the Society for Scientific Exploration or Parapsychological Association. JSE is then written off for allowing various strange opinions to be posted, so any protocols posted there are written off as guilt by association. Once you have the allowed avenues for successful replications properly pigeon holed, you can ensure they are *not* indexed by normal scholar engines.

So when a person goes to check for evidence, they check the same search engine they've used for whitepapers since college. Since those don't index the places that need to be checked for ESP, there is "no evidence." They very well might have used Google Scholar or similar to check. Krippner writes about this problem indirectly in one of his books; a research team at Harvard actually replicates the same results as parapsychologists but only credits the refuted Milton-Wiseman paper instead of any followups. I suspect this is integrally related with only the Milton-Wiseman paper being available in scholastic specialized search engines.
 
Well, statements like this don't contain any content. I could say exactly the same thing about your remarks. The problem is that people seem to have this idea that the mind cannot be "tricking" them, or presenting them with something that is not literally what it appears to be, or presenting it with an agenda, the most likely orientation of which is physical survival. Physical survival is the most important thing to the organism. Almost everything about your body and mind, honed from the first unicellular creatures over billions of years, has been "about" that. If this is *not* about that, then frankly the burden of proof lies with that claim. I'm not even saying that NDEs *can't* have a relevance which is beyond survival...but at present, it's a case of "I'll believe that when I see it."
Thanks!
Another series of straw men for my collection.
I've never asserted any of the above. You're just making a futile rant against some of your own projections.

The problem is that people seem to have this idea that the mind cannot be "tricking" them, or presenting them with something that is not literally what it appears to be, or presenting it with an agenda
The same could be said for people who seem to have this idea that the mind must be tricking them in each and every instance.
Furthermore the same people don't even realize the cognitive dissonance when they pretend to hold the Truth and maintain that the mind is a trickster, at the same time :D

Is there an outstanding reason why you feel qualified to claim when the mind is or is not tricking other people?
It's a slippery slope and it sounds like you might be falling victim of the same mechanism.

Not sure why you conflate materialism with the existence of evolution. The two do not appear to me to be necessarily connected. The question is whether there is a discernible advantage in survival terms to having an NDE, and then asking onself whether NDEs fit the profile for such a survivial function.
The fact that an advantage can be hypothesized doesn't provide substance to the argument.
In fact a case for evolutionary adaptation can be made for any human ability/behavior, which incidentally is what materialism does, categorically, for each and every human behavior. You seem to be falling for the same delusion.

If your objective is to analyze the NDE phenomena confined in the restricted (an unimaginative) intellectual perimeter of materialism, then suit yourself. In such case the just-so claims will suffice, as one is only required to have blind faith in all of the reductionist's philosophical assumptions.

Otherwise, can you provide any substantial evidence (of the scientific kind) that at least some features of the NDE come from evolutionary adaptations?
Anything more tham "just-so" stories would be at least a step forward.

I am specifically asking about some features because I want to make your job easier :D You seem to claim that all features, of all NDEs that have ever occurred, could be lumped into a single explanation. I wouldn't want to have to provide solid evidence for that! ;)

I would hope that a mind free from prejudice and preconception would be able to see that physiological, evolutionary and transcendental aspects might all be at play in the phenomena. Hasty generalizations typically hide an ideological agenda.

I don't appeal to pseudo-science, but to have that conversation you would first need to understand the difference between pseudoscience and science, which I am not convinced you do
Maybe you should read a thing or two about evolutionary psychology?
 
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