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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
1. are you a licensed physician?
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Personal questions about me are irrelevant and off topic. Address the post not the poster. Address what I said in the post, not who you think is saying it.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
If you're an MD I will give more thought to your replies because you're obviously an expert of some sort.
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That is called "Appeal to Authority". My qualifications, which are none of your business, do not lend weight to what I say. What I am saying stands in and of itself. What I say is either true, or not. Accurate, or not. The letters after my name are irrelevant. Again: Address the post content, not the poster.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
2. if all this is simply the product of the brain, then why are so many prominent physicians such as Pim van Lommel, Sam Parnia, Kenneth Ring, Melvin Morse, Michael Sabom, Jeffrey Long and a dozen other prominent physicians studying these experiences so intensely.
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Because they should do so. I have NOTHING against studying these things. It is a good thing.
The REASON why we study some of these things in our field is very clear. We want to learn about the brain and how and why it works.
And one thing we know better than anything else is that if you want to understand how something works, then the BEST way to do this is study version of it that are not working as normal and understand why.
When it comes to the brain this is _exactly_ why we study NDE, brain damage, unusual personality traits or delusions and much more.
Take for example the work of VS Ramachandran. He actively seeks out people with damaged or unusual brains. And by comparing them to "normal" brains he has pushed forward the frontier of knowledge in neuroscience in leaps and bounds. He is often described as the Napoleon of Neuroscience.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
They are trying to get studies funded but powerful atheistic interests want these experiences squelched
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Nonsense. You are making up conspiracy theories now. The science community actively wants such experiences studied. They have much to tell us about the nature of the brain and consciousness.
Again take the work of VS Ramachandran with "Blind Sight".
"Blind sight" is where entirely blind people can see. It sounds magical doesnt it? Their visual cortex was totally destroyed but in some ways they can still "see". No one could explain this. So of course people like you rushed in to make up all kinds of meta and supernatural explanations for it.
But Ramachandran found a guy who was blind but if you MOVED an object in front of him he could tell you which direction it moved. How was this possible? Ramachandran found out. He discovered a previously ENTIRELY unknown visual pathway that was evolutionarily "older" than our main one. All this pathway can "see" is motion. Nothing else. It is similar to the visual brain structure in lizards who can not "see" the flies they catch so expertly with their long tongues.... but they simply "see" motion.
My studying the unusual experience therefore Ramachandran learned about a whole visual pathway in the brain that no one knew about before. We LEARN from studying unusual experience.
So when you present uncontrolled second and third hand anecdotes about people who have experiences during periods you believe they should not have been able to then there are several explanations possible:
1) Your fantasy might be right that they somehow leave their body. So far NOTHING substantiates this view however.
2) The experiences they claim did not actually happen during the period you claim it does, but before or after.
3) The experiences were modified or invented due to poor interviewing techniques, which alas happens a LOT more often than you think.
4) Similar to "blind sight" there may be other pathways of sight, sound, touch, smell and so forth we simply do not know of yet.
5) Someone somewhere might simply be lying with an agenda.
My expectation is that it is all a combination of 2, 3, and 5. My hope is that all these studies help us find out more about 4 however. And thus far nothing.... not just very little but NOTHING...... lends even a modicum of credence or expectation to 1.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
The questions you pose I cannot answer. I'm upfront about that. I can just say that we wouldn't see a predominantly atheist group of physicians wasting their time and efforts studying these NDE's if there was absolutely nothing to them.
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But again, as I described above, no one is claiming "there is nothing to them". There is LOTS "to them" which is why these physicians study them.
What there is "nothing to" is YOUR interpretation and explanation of them. That is a separate thing entirely and you are conflating the two which is leading to you being confused as to why atheist physicians want to study them.... and your wholesale invention of an atheist agenda and conspiracy theory to maintain some kind of imagined "status quo" in science. You are in fantasy la la land with that too.
In summary: We want to study these things, AT LENGTH, because there is something going on there and we want to understand how and what. We simply do not subscribe to YOUR interpretation and explanations of what is going on here. Because yours are entirely unsubstantiated nonsense based on nothing but open questions that you want your answers to be correct for.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
Nozz, you were inquiring about why there are no studies.
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Erm I never said such a thing anywhere ever. I never said there were no studies. I said there were no studies showing a particular given RESULT.
If I said the bakery had no pink cakes would you go around claiming I said the bakery had no cakes?
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I guess my denomination choice determines my ability to have a NDE in his brain. 
