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News Briefs 17-01-2014

By G. Calofon

“Seek out reality, leave things that seem.”

Quote of the Day:

“Minute by minute they live: 
The stone’s in the midst of all.”

W.B. Yeats

G. Calof
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5 Comments

  1. The future of office space is . . .
    Dystopia. I live where Amazon is adding to the urban blight downtown. There’s already a surplus of empty office space there, but rather than retask any of that Bezos has opted for this vanity monstrosity that will choke the narrow streets with traffic making it difficult for public transit buses to pass through quickly and efficiently even with street parking bans. Buildings in the vicinity of this construction are being demolished to build high-rise parking lots and high-rise, insanely overpriced apartments. Amazon’s new HQ is an urban disaster unfolding before our eyes.

  2. Consciousness after death
    Not sure why facts gets misinterpreted in this way. This experiment measured brain activity during death, which is a process that takes some time. There nothing such like “after” death in this data. Strictly, it was not even investigated consciousness.

    1. Yes, and
      Yes, it’s impossible to get the testimony of someone who has completely died as to what their experience is, yet it never seems to keep materialists from telling us all about what that is, and with a stubborn and unevidenced certainty that is so much rarer among those who believe that what those who, from all appearances, almost died have told us about their experience. Why, the materialists are also full to the top of assertions about the illusory nature of those experiences with all kinds of certain statements about why the only experts on those experiences, the people who have had them, had those experiences when there is absolutely no real evidence supporting the materialists claims, quite often presented as if they did have what they didn’t, any scientifically gained and analyzed evidence that their proposed debunking of them are even possible.

  3. “After-Death” Brain Activity Not New
    I remember this brief story from 2009, regarding bursts of neuronal activity in 7 terminal patients recorded right at the moment of death. Apparently, the process of collecting this data was completely ethical:

    http://news.discovery.com/human/health/near-death-brain.htm

    The journalist who wrote the above article had the decency at least to properly distinguish between “near-death” and “after death’. The activity in the mice brains is interesting, especially the occurrence of gamma bursts, which is also an occurrence recorded during deep meditative states. Here’s one such study:

    Lutz A., Greischar L.L., Rawlings N.B., Ricard M., Davidson R.J. (2004). “Long-term meditators self-induce high apmlitude gamma synchrony during mental practice”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101: 16369–16373.

    But once again, the definition of clinical death (stopped heart and cessation of circulation) has been known for decades to not necessarily correlate directly with complete organism death, per se. Borjigin and her research team seem too eager to assume that scientific understanding of consciousness and its connection to bodily processes is comprehensive, such as in statements like whether consciousness “actually requires far less oxygen and energy than previously thought.” Dying, near-death, and after-death are used interchangeably by Borjigin in the article, which is bad form even if they are trying to adhere to semantics such as strictly referring to death as “clinical” or cardiac and circulatory death. Then again, the interest of the researchers appears to be mostly conventional scientifically speaking, paying lip service to what could be called higher insights like the “nature of consciousness” but in fact looking to just couch the phenomena into what Borjigis calls a “scientific framework” which would allow definitive physical explanations of NDEs and OOBs to be developed that would finally lay to rest fanciful notions of some deeper and greater experience of meaning and connection to and relationship with reality or that life and consciousness may extend beyond the limits of whatever body we find ourselves in. Certainly, some pretty interesting medical applications could come from such research, as the researchers hint at, and I am not at all opposed to the research or whatever actual discoveries come from it. But to make definitive statements and not acknowledge the assumptions driving them underneath…you know what they say about assumptions.

    1. pseudoskeptics getting very predictable
      Personly I think the idea that NDES are brain-based is possible but unlikly given what we have learned about the elusive phenomenon.

      people who live by the creed of materialism seem to act like evidence in favor of offending phenomenon does not exist. (especially when trying to explain it)

      oxygen deprevation,shock psycology,DMT… none of those explain the veridical information got by people who have had an experience while they where brain dead (the brain activiy in the rats only lasted 30 seconds).

      of course the evidence is not enough to prove it conclusivly…yet. there are many over phenomenon that do have more than enough evidence to prove there existence. like psi.

      the evidence in favor of psi is so strong that skeptisism of this “effect” should be relegated to a form of denialism. to take its place amonge creationism and holocaused denial.

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