I'm not sure I understand your post enough to opine one way or the other. Our exchange began when you had seemed to be responding to a point of mine, disagreeing with me, but I don't think I said anything related to what you're bringing up in your post. Just want to make sure I correctly understand that you've moved onto a different topic rather than taking an issue with what I posted.
If your post was meant to relate to mine, I'm afraid I don't understand and would ask you to clarify. and in a prior post "Parapsychology has some early results that in my opinion merit proceeding to more resource intensive, lower risk of bias studies. My post that you were responding to was arguing that until such studies are done, parapsychology will remain at the showing promise stage."
Arouet,
I am trying to take you and others out of their comfort zone and reveal your position as cast in politics rather than logic. Psychology is a field of science with documented observations. However, it does not have reductive basis in physics. It is the observations of mental behavior and relies on neuroscience and not on mechanics. How "understanding" (a fundamental process in mental output) is modeled in terms of neural correlates has eluded the the analysis side of science, which excludes "para-data" for metaphysical reasons. I have been making the point, without acknowledgement, that there are at least two steps in science - one is data-gathering and the other analysis. The term "para" psychology is just a political b.s. to make some observations not count.
I find the papers referenced in the opening post from Chawala et all and Borjigin et all - good research and excellent pragmatic science. One investigator finds at near-death, a brief outburst of signals from asphyxia, as electrical activity. And the other author, an outburst of chemical signals to the heart.
This is data gathering at its best. They note, with this new observation, that these chemical signals harm the heart's ability to recover. In this fashion, chemistry can be used to help the heart not give-out as soon as our natural body functions dictate. This is good and practical analysis.
Then the assertion and conjecture is made that these outbursts may be related to hallucination, from the noise of the signals, and explain an NDE experience. This is analysis work at its worst. It is gains attention for the authors, but is in my humble opinion, a ridiculous analysis and is a blatant marketing ploy.
Why would evolution evolve a biological response that harms the heart? Biological evolution as telenomic processes does not waste biochemistry that hurts survival potential, without a trade-off benefit.
If they did recall that electrical surge, we hypothesize and speculate that that could be what people describe in their near-death experiences. The one thing that we’ve seen rather consistently when you read the literature of near-death experiences is that not everyone has the same imagery. Not everyone has the same experience.
But the one thing that they all have in common is that the experience is very intense and very vivid. People can usually recall many, many years later on with great detail what they experienced. So it would take something that would be a very durable electrical event of energy for someone to have that. So we put those notions together and arrived at that speculation. - Dr. Lakhmir Chawla
What!!!! Durable events from intense electrical activity are remembered as PAIN. They are meaningless signals and damage nervous systems (including the heart-brain, as they find). What is actually recalled from NDE's are deep-meanings from
understanding one's personal life objectively. The point in my prior posts - that I must have made poorly - is that the process of any understanding is not modeled with comprehension in the brain = mind context.
My other point is that it is the ignoring (or ignorance) of information science that is at the bottom of all this. I point out that quantum effects are "weird" to physicalism, but sensible in informational realism. This state of affairs in physics is parallel to the SoA in cognitive science where claims are made about brains states leading to weird explanations of understanding, when understanding is an informational processes occurring within a different environmental SoA.
Neuroscience is about how the brain processes information - 1.3 in the book subtitled Probabilistic Approaches to Neural Coding
There is no such thing as "para", except in the politics of materialism that makes data-gathering of mental states, at near-death, less than any other natural data. The data gathering is just data-gathering in the same scientific field and the para-psychology tag is simply childish name calling. There is no promises being made - only observations that have yet to be yield an integrated process model that is explanatory. I think this model is much closer than many think, if information science is left to lead the field. Physics explaining mental algorithms - is a square peg into a round hole.