Hello All, Here are 2 articles written by Robert Lanza with the arguments that death is not the end. I would probably be skeptical, but in first article he uses scientific word "experiments": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/do-you-only-live-once-exp_b_508440.html "A series of landmark experiments show that measurements an observer makes can influence events that have already happened in the past. One experiment (Science 315, 966, 2007) confirmed that flipping a switch could retroactively change a result that had happened before the switch was flipped. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it'll be you who will experience the outcomes −- the universes −- that will result." And in second he uses the word "evidence": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/what-happens-when-you-die_b_596600.html "Without consciousness, space and time are nothing; in reality you can take any time -- whether past or future -− as your new frame of reference. Death is a reboot that leads to all potentialities. That's the reality that the experiments mandate. " Please look through the articels,they are not big and let me know what you think. Thank you
Since I've already been pronounced dead once and didn't see anything while I was dead I can't believe anyone who says they know there is something after you die for there isn't. That's a first hand experience which this guy does not have. How can anyone talk about something that they have never experienced honestly?
There is no special life energy. It's electrochemical in nature, and even though energy is not destroyed, our brains are destroyed upon death. That energy becomes worm food and your heat soon dissipates. This article is a bunch of pseudoscience wackiness, which is what the Huffington Post is generally known for, with the exceptions of the fine essays by the late Victor Stenger.
Being pronounced dead is not the same thing as being dead. A reasonable definition of "death," at least for a warm-blooded vertebrate, is "irreversible degradation of the synapses." At this juncture, the animal's brain is no longer capable of managing and directing the central nervous system. A few basic biological functions, controlled by the autonomic nervous system (such as breathing and perhaps even heartbeat), may continue for several hours, but without considerable external management (especially intravenous nutrition), the organism will eventually begin to decay. If the oxygen continues to flow, then even while deeply unconscious the organism may be, strictly speaking, alive, but unless the brain eventually recovers from the trauma, death will eventually occur--again, unless considerable external management is applied. When a doctor pronounces a patient dead, he is looking for a few key processes whose termination is indicative of death, but only in the vast majority of cases. There will always be exceptions. Babies, in particular, retain many of the physiological characteristics of other mammals for several months. If immersed in icy water, their bodies may express the mammalian diving reflex, which shuts off blood flow to everything except the brain and the large muscles needed for swimming. The last I heard, the record for a "drowned" baby recovering with virtually no damage was fifteen minutes underwater! You don't say how long your doctor believed you to be dead, but I suspect that his tests were rudimentary. Even without breathing, if the heart continues to beat at an almost imperceptible rate, and the considerable store of oxygen in the blood continues to nourish the unconscious brain. This is why the most important part of CPR is the "C" (cardiac--pound on the heart at regular intervals), and not the "P" (pulmonary: keep the lungs pumping). You weren't dead. When the brain runs low on oxygen it tends to get a bit looney. Many people report visions and experiences that couldn't possibly be real. You, unfortunately, didn't have any experiences. However, since you woke up alive and well, I doubt that you'll complain about missing out on the fantasies. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! People have feared death since the Stone Age. They have always made up fancy fairy tales to support the illogical faith in the oxymoronic idea of "life after death." It makes them feel better. Oddly, Orthodox Jews do not believe in life after death, at least not the Christian version of a Heaven filled with angels. They believe that your body will lie lifeless in the ground until Judgment Day, when God will come down and reanimate all the corpses, sort out the good from the evil, and send each group to their appropriate fate. (Since I am not a religionist, much less an Orthodox Jew, I have no idea what those fates are.) This is why they don't allow embalming, cremation, autopsy or organ donation. You don't want to wake up staring into the eyes of God, without a heart, or with veins full of embalming fluid instead of blood, or simply as a pile of ashes. Apparently God isn't clever enough to reanimate corpses in those conditions. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Even though he is, apparently, clever enough to reanimate corpses that have decayed for a couple of billion years, so that their molecules are no longer even all in the same place. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You know that I don't want to go to anywhere that people tell me is a place that has many people that were so called Christians that murdered, raped and did all sorts of sadistic and terrible things to others while they were alive. Did you know the Catholics are given a way into "heaven" no matter what crimes they committed so I don't need to be going to a place like that. For all who think they are going to heaven good luck for I won't be there thankfully to watch those who hurt others be given such a nice place to exist after committing such grievous things when they lived.
Use of a single magic word can erase your skepticism? (I've seen it before, but usually the word is 'quantum', pop-science-speak for 'anything goes'.) That would be retro-causality, backwards-causation, and I'm very skeptical that there is credible experimental evidence of that happening on the macro-scale in which one 'flips a switch'. I'd like to see that Science paper. And what does retrocausality have to do with the likelihood of life after death? Here's some evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocentric_universe Lanza appears to be a medical doctor who seems to lack formal education in philosophy, who seems to have reinvented metaphysical idealism, one of the oldest theories in the history of ideas. He insists that space, time and the physical universe only exist in consciousness, so that consciousness has priority over physics and whatever happens to the physical body. It's unfortunate when people trained in science start to imagine themselves as grand metaphysicians. (It's usually physicists doing that, it's less common with biologists.) It's doubly unfortunate when the 'science' shelves at neighborhood bookstores become filled with popular titles promoting their authors' unfounded and exceedingly unlikely speculations, presenting them to lay readers as if they are well-established Science, with all the authority that suggests. And people wonder why the lay public becomes skeptical and fails to trust everything that comes at them flying the infallible and inerrant flag of 'Science'.
With our lightspeed media nowadays, scientific assertions made a month ago are starting to become questioned a month later. People are starting to remember. They are beginning to see what a truly messy business science really is, with competing theories all clamoring for peer-reviewed publication, and internet sites claiming this and that new discovery in their headlines. It is a symptom of our times, that information is so quickly expedited to us that we are beginning to see the fundamental uncertainty inside of science itself. Welcome to the postmodern age, where anything can be true for at least one news cycle, and the old classical narrative of institutional learnedness is crumbling to pieces.
The problem is connected to the assumption of a random universe. Random allows anything to be true at least for a short time. If the universe is random, then coffee can be good today and then coffee can bad next week. It is all about nature flipping a coin, with heads and tails both appearing. Science has become the image of its assumption with the cart leading the horse. In gambling , the house always wins, over the long term. The question becomes, who is the "house", who wins, no matter whether coffee is good or coffee is bad? Many of the Scientists are like gamblers hoping to win big in a science casino. They come to the science casinos to gamble, with them being compted with more funding, even if they loose. But who is the house who always wins, since there will always be more losers than winners in a science casino; long term science versus shot term fad? Before addressing that, the problem with a random view of the universe, is the use of black boxes. All we need to know is input and output, because the black box is left closed, shrouded in mystery. Any answer, both good coffee or bad coffee, helps the random brain, gain a sense of control, over the black box mystery. If you play slot machines, one anticipates a winner by a sequence of losses. I am no longer allowed to respond in the science sections of the forums (do not have those privileges), because I dare to open the black boxes, which is taboo in casino science; like card counting. If you look at the statistical concept of risk, which is scariest demon of the random universe perception, things do not add up logically. For example, say I smoke, I would be told there is a risk I will get a disease relative to smoking. Say I go my entire life and never get any such disease, there was never any risk, in a logical world, since nothing panned out. Zero data means, the original premise was flawed. In the world of random, I will still be expected to pretend I had risk, that was never there, based on how risk is defined; self serving technicality. I was supposed to run and hide from a boogey man, that was never there in terms of my own reality. This trick may help explain who the house is. This has less to do with reality, as it has to do with a perception, that loops back to itself, so even bad science is considered good; even bad hand of cards tells us something of the next hand. I don't think culture should be funding an addiction, that distorts the mind to where it will justify it own behavior; gambling addictions.
You don't understand statistics. If there is a 99% chance that you will get cancer from smoking, there is still a 1% chance that you will not. The fact that you did not yet get cancer has no bearing on the odds.
Before any of us were born, all of us were as dead as we could possibly be, whether you can remember it or not. So was there life before life? I'm not talking about a gleam in a parent's eye. To any real deity, this would essentially be the same situation as life after death, wouldn't it? Who, exactly, saved us from eternal damnation in that realm, in the unconscious aeons before we were born? That might even turn out have been a much longer time than between now and the next time you are eventually resurrected. If those you left behind feel strongly enough about missing you, resurrection is fast becoming a practical possibility. Stranger things happen all the time. Think about it. Morality is not a carrot vs. a stick, unless you are some sort of g_d idiot.
