Have you contemplated your own mortality?

[Liquid Len]

Sudden cessation of the flow of blood to the head as occurs during cardiac arrest causes failure of the eyes and the brain manifesting as blindness and paralysis of all muscles after 3-19 seconds, followed by loss of consciousness after 4-20 seconds (1). This period of consciousness remaining after the heart stops is why some cardiac arrest patients complain bitterly when painful resuscitative measures are begun before they lose consciousness.

All anyone can say is that the EEG is certainly flat by 1-3 minutes after the heart suddenly stops beating (1). This is a known fact.

(1) Rossen R, et al: Acute arrest of cerebral circulation in man.Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1943) 50: 510-528.

www.mortalminds.org/lommel.html





Besides, according to anaesthesists the EEG and the VEP (for the brain stem activity) unfortunately aren't 100% reliable.

[dukeofpain]

I suppose this is a rhetorical question.

If you know what you're talking about, it's not. If you don't know what you're talking about, then it's rhetorical.

Obviously not, since I've mentioned other arguments, too.
However, I heard a doctor saying so, and I see no reason to mistrust that (it could easily be checked by a glance into the medical literature), and besides it seems just logical.

OK well, I am a Doctor. Believe what I say, becuase I know more than everyone else.

dukeofpain said:

Usually when someone is near dead, the doctors spend their time trying to save the person, not give him a catscan,

Indeed; but in some circumstances it happens that the brain activity gets supervised while a person is near death (as you call it). I know of a case where the patient (Pam Reynolds) had a NDE during an operation where she was clinically dead for quite a long time; her brain was supervised with an EEG and additionally with a device to cover the brain stem, and no brain activity could be detected (as it was planned before the operation: They wanted to stop the brain activity and drain the blood out of the brain in order to facilitate the brain surgery).

It just so happens that I've been near death, and jack shit happened. So, what does that mean? God and the devil didn't like me?

[dukeofpain]

1 entry found for clinical death.
Main Entry: clinical death
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: the condition of a person when heartbeat and respiration have ceased; irreversible loss of function, esp. breathing and consciousness
Example: The anatomical basis for the concept of clinical death resides in the loss of brain-stem function.

If a person has no pulse and isn't breathing, they're dead!

[Dodona Underground]

It's the coward's wish to have a quick, painless death. But the cowards are right. Unless you believe that a long, slow, painful death is the last penance that will complete and justify your time in this world or that it's necessary to discharge some other duty, there's no inherent value in it. I agree with Begbie---Give me the firing squad.

I also resent the indignity of not only how we die but how easy it is for some stupidity and senseless brutality to injure or kill us. I hate how fragile our bodies are. In a bar fight your eyes can be gouged out to hang by the optic nerves and you can be blinded. A bad fall can paralyze you below the neck. If you're swimming in the wrong part of the water with the wrong kind of big, dumb fish, he won't respect you as a higher species. To him you're just fish food. How embarrassing.

Then there are terminal diseases. Is it fitting that a man who has lived a life worthy of respect spends his final months, shitting himself, coughing up blood, and otherwise living in agony, terror and humiliation while his helpless family and friends watch every spasm and lapse in bravery? Is it right that that will be their final memory of you?

Screw the firing squad. I want nothing less majestic than a missile or a meteorite to take me out. If possible, I want the missile or meteorite to have my full name incribed on it.

[Liquid Len]

Duke, why are you so emotional? Do you have problems?

dukeofpain said:

If you know what you're talking about, it's not. If you don't know what you're talking about, then it's rhetorical.
OK well, I am a Doctor. Believe what I say, becuase I know more than everyone else.

Allright, let's reexaminate then what I said:

waldm said:

their heart wasn't beating anymore. In such a case, the brain stops working within a few seconds, (...)
the brain doesn't work for a long time without heart beat.

Now I have given you a reference:

waldm said:

All anyone can say is that the EEG is certainly flat by 1-3 minutes after the heart suddenly stops beating (1). This is a known fact.

(1) Rossen R, et al: Acute arrest of cerebral circulation in man.Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1943) 50: 510-528.

This seems to suggest a longer time span than what I was initially claiming.

But I also gave you a reference claiming that

Sudden cessation of the flow of blood to the head as occurs during cardiac arrest causes failure of the eyes and the brain manifesting as blindness and paralysis of all muscles after 3-19 seconds, followed by loss of consciousness after 4-20 seconds (1).

Apparantly either me or the doctor I was drawing upon confused the timespan regarding the occuring of a flat EEG with the occuring of the loss of consciousness.
Actually it's the loss of consciousness that is of importance here, but it might be questioned if this can be verified reliably from the outside. "Loss of consciousness" after 4-20 seconds might just mean that the person appears unconscious by this time. It would be of interest to know how Rossen et al. backed up their claim.

My further claims:

waldm said:

NDEs are very vivid, intense and subjectively impressive,

Common place. Read the reports.

waldm said:

they can hardly be produced by some isolated brain cells firing here and there.

Common place. Intensity of conscious experience is proportional to brain activity.

waldm said:

And the visual cortex is on the brain surface anyway,

Basic school knowledge.

waldm said:

its activity is easily measured.

Basic knowledge. EEG.

waldm said:

Such visual impressions can't be ascribed to hidden activities deep inside the brain, at least without changing our theories how the brain works.

Logically inferred from above.

dukeofpain said:

It just so happens that I've been near death, and jack shit happened. So, what does that mean? God and the devil didn't like me?

??
I'm sorry?

dukeofpain said:

If a person has no pulse and isn't breathing, they're dead!

Indeed, that's the common definition of the expression "clinical death".
So what?

[Liquid Len]

dukeofpain said:

It just so happens that I've been near death, and jack shit happened. So, what does that mean? God and the devil didn't like me?

You mean you've been close to death and nothing happened? Well, that's hardly a new discovery; as I said, only a small fraction of the resuscitated remember having experienced something. According to Parnia and van Lommel it's 11-18%. And it just confirms that, normally, you quickly get unconscious without heart beat.

[Liquid Len]

I've checked my notes now, and my memory was perfectly right: The doc I mentioned stated that the brain activity ceases eight seconds after the heart beat has stopped. This doesn't seem in accordance with what my above linked reference says. I think the most reasonable way to interpretate this contradiction, is that after eight seconds our normal brain wave activity has ceased (alpha waves, beta waves etc), but there may still be sporadic, irregular, weak electrical activities found up to three minutes after clinical death. However, it's well known that not every brain activity is conscious or leads to consciousness, and especially for the very vivid, colourful NDEs a clear, unambiguous brain activity must be expected, similar to that of REM dreams.

To sum it up:
If we're disregarding paranormal explanations, it's most likely that

- an NDE may occur before and after a cardiac arrest (as I said before)
(In fact, there are people who reported having had an NDE although they had never come close to death. Sometimes the mere belief that one is close to death seems to suffice to cause an NDE.)
- or it might be made possible during the cardiac arrest due to cardiac massage (what was also news to me)

[Liquid Len]

I already wrote about my thoughts on the question whether our personal death, understood as extinction, should - from a purely egoistical, egocentrical view - be regarded as something negative or as something at least neutral. Now I should ask myself if our biological death is likely to mean extinction, or not.

On the one hand there is no conclusive, compelling evidence for life after death. We've already had the subject of NDEs. Another at first sight promising phenomenon are alleged memories of previous lives. Some children have them spontaneously, some few get them spontaneously later in their life (e.g. during an NDE), and most of the adults get them in trance- or hypnotic regressions. It might be debatable how good or bad this body of evidence is; at least I myself have heard of very impressive cases. But IMO even the best possible case that might be conceivable in theory could be explained alternatively by ESP (extrasensory perception). (And you don't have to assume immortal souls in order to make a working model of ESP.)

On the other hand, the findings of neuro science strongly indicate that every capacity of the human mind gets lost, if the corresponding brain structures are destroyed. Some might reply that the brain is only a control device for the mind in order to manifest itself in the material world. Often they compare the situation with a driver who makes use of a car. If the car is out of order, the driver can't drive, although he hasn't lost his abilities. Well, this might be a plausible analogy in the case of someone who has lost his ability to move properly due to a brain defect, or of someone who has lost one of his senses. It's getting already rather dubious in the case of personality changes and changes of the emotions, since we all accept that alcohol and other material drugs do have an influence on this - why should a brain defect be unable to produce similar effects? But it's getting completely counter intuitive in the case of someone who doesn't understand language anymore. According to the car analogy, the mind is still able to understand, but it can't prove it anymore. But if someone obviously is neither blind nor deaf, it's getting hard to see why he should be able to understand while being unable to prove it, especially if he is still able to move his tongue and make use of his vocal chords. Or otherwise he will usually still be able to move his hand and grasp a pencil. So, to me it's clear that the car analogy doesn't work.
We also have to imagine once, that, if the brain just limited the mind's abilities that it can manifest in the material world, i.e. if someone's mind might be much more intelligent than he is able to show, then it might also be the case that animals' souls are much more intelligent than human souls, and that it's only their brains that prevent them from proving it...

Furthermore, it's not only that the capacities of the mind can get lost, but also consciousness (awareness) itself. It's obvious that people somtimes get unconscious, during sleep, or when they faint, or under anaesthesia. I know - it's also possible that no one ever gets unconscious and that all that gets lost is the memories of what happened during an episode of apparent unconsciousness. On the other hand there's zero evidence for this, whereas unconscious people clearly appear to be very unconscious. Hence, the idea seems a little far-fetched. And what everybody has to admit is that the degree of awareness can vary a lot - from extremely awake and concentrated (perhaps in a dangerous sword duel) to the haziest daze (when you're staring at the wall and don't notice its colour). So why not even to unconsciousness?
Now, the point is that this degree of awareness is also depending on the brain's activity, or more precisely on the activity of the brain stem or reticular system at the upper end of the spinal cord. If this activity is inhibited, unconsciousness is, without exception, the effect.

These neurobiological findings are obviously very important if we're asking ourselves whether death means extinction. However, it isn't a compelling proof, since what's decisive isn't the question if our consciousness can survive death. Even though we're sometimes unconscious during life, we can usually regain our consciousness afterwards - if we're still existing then. Thus the decisive question is the one after our personal identity. If that what we are can survive death, we might be able to regain our consciousness, some time. For this we would have to assume the existence of something that is neither material nor consciousness, which would have to be our identity. We could call that thing "soul". It's clear that defining our identity could hardly be its sole purpose, since otherwise it would be a highly suspicious assumption; and then even conscious beings could be mortal, if they had the bad luck of not having (or being) a soul. Thus, IMO it should at least have the secondary function of converting the neuronal representations that are in the brain into subjective experience.

Unfortunately, this concept of souls has a serious problem: It can hardly be denied that higher animals do have conscious experiences as well - not only humans. It might seem debatable if insects and other inferior creatures have conscious experiences, but if you're doubting that dogs and cattle have them, you could as well doubt that other human beings are conscious. After all, even human brains are not identical to each other. But even though I'm willing to admit that higher animals do have conscious experiences, I simply cannot believe that every single one of them is an eternal, immortal being. Just looking at their lives - basically they seem often too absurd. Some philosophers have said that the human life is absurd. (This doesn't mean that you should kill yourself, or that life isn't worth living; it rather means that our situation is an absurd one.) However, that's a controversial observation, and it's in any case a subjective, emotion-laden impression, since many people feel that their life is full of meaning, of fate and providence, and whatever. This impression might be wrong, though. But looking at animal lives I can't help thinking that their lives are absurd.
So in short, I don't want to deny that some animals are as conscious as we are, i.e. the assumption of souls cannot be allowed to make a difference between us; and at the same time I don't believe that they are eternal. Hence, I can't really believe that we are eternal.

[Liquid Len]

The belief that we are very mortal, temporally limited beings can in fact be very beautiful. I don't mean comforting, of course.
IMO the beauty of this concept can best be seen in the early work of Albert Camus, especially in the short essay collection "Noces" (Nuptials).
Especially the first two ("Noces à Tipasa" and "Le vent à Djémila") are marvellous, and the rest hardly any less.

[murphee]

[nerdling301]

ugh i HATE this question. i've expended so much time on researching the afterlife, NDEs, and all sorts of that good stuff only to come out no closer to an answer. The unknowability of the answer drives me mad (and i'm sure i'm not alone in this), and currently i've just given up trying to figure it out and to enjoy my life as it is. Right now, i'm just scared and anxious in general. I don't want an end, because i'm so incredibly afraid of the unknown and the possibility of not existing. It just shakes me to the core, the marrow of my very person (sorry for the emo language there), that something like death could be 100% FINAL. Now onto my theory for an afterlife:

Is there a God? most likely, who started it all? And to those who say that God needed a creator too, did you consider the fact that God could exist outside of the dimension of time (whereas the universe clearly exists partially in it)? As far as religion goes (atheism is a religion too, since you profess faith in God NOT existing through the discoveries of science), if you're not forcing your views on anyone else or hurting anyone, more power to you.

Now as far as the afterlife is concerned, i think that our consciousnesses are WAY too complex to be chalked up to that lump of yogurt in our heads. How could the brain create something to control it (consciousness) in the first place? Where in nature is there an example of something creating something else to control it? Nowadays science is reviving people who have been dead (no EKG etc) for over 5 minutes, and the near-death experience is becoming more and more common. If you want to seriously talk about near death experiences and scientific verification of the afterlife, i've come up with a little theory on my own. Take string theory, which posits that there are 11 dimensions in our universe (we currently exist in four, three of which are of space and one of time), and combine it with the "death flash" (click first result in my link)

scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Electromagnetic+radiation+and+the+afterlife&btnG=Search

Our consciousness, transmitted in the necrotic radiation, goes into one or more of the 7 universes that we cannot percieve in our current living state, and we continue to exist.