h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think i THINK is a good name actually.
What would you change it to?
i still THINK?
i did THINK?
i would THINK?

Fell like I am back at school with the kids

Amanda out

"Is "walking toward the light" a spiritual or neurological near death experience?

Spiritual, death means the shut down of neurological function.
Does God speak to us thru the limbic system?


Yes.

"spirituality can include a search for a sense of increased awareness, nearness, and communication with a higher power. It involves a number of presumably exlusively human cognitive functions such as particular modes of awareness,(check) imagination, (Check )creativity, (check) and specific forms of emotion."(check)


aren't these the things I've been displaying here ?


"my response is best captured by this: "
If it made you laugh it must be a good thing ,biggrin>

The higher power resides in you.
I can only show you the door, you have to open it yourself ! ,biggrin>

go see lecture and let me know how it went !

" believe that when the brain is dying all sorts of things happen to it. You think you see things but do not."

How is this very different from when a brain is living?

It's not different to when the brain is living. The things we see when we are living are not always real either.
My point still remains that when the brain is dying you could appear to be moving toward a light when in fact you were not.


Amanda out,

Amanda
'Walking' towards the light and 'moving' towards the light are in fact metaphors we take with us from the habit of having a physical body.
Actually neither really apply to the scenerio.
Does a thought walk or move?
It just is.
What you think, is real to you. This includes in and out of body experiences.
All around the world people have experienced near death experiences and their stories all seem to have common factors.

Do you think the dying brain, will take them on the same 'journey,' even when their lives and cultural differences give them different dreams in life?

All brains are the same, regardless of race, and culture etc.
There is no reason for a dying brain lacking in oxygen etc to act any different to anyone else's.

Amanda out,

Yes all brains are the same, but we are not talking about organics similarities.
We are talking about thoughts and dreams.
Put my brain under the microscope and it will look very similar to George Bushes and Osmam bin Lardens, what it does and how it works On a subconscious level is very different however ...thank goodness.
and what I produce with it is very very different.

I mean that all dying brains will react in the same way.
Subconcious has nothing to do with it.
The dying brain is injured and has a reaction to the injury.
You seem to go toward a light.

aManda

Where do these dreams and visions come from .
An injured brain runs a scenerio that many people identify with ?
Going towards a light is the smallest part of the experience.

How many dreams have you ever had that are identicle to any single other person ?
Why doesn't the brain just switch off, what purpose does running a last minute feature film have?
Does it assist some kind of recovery do you think?

The way I see it the brain's just an organ, like any other, that produces and circulates electrical signals, telling the body what to do based on information observed by our various senses. Our consciousness is just an amalgamation of all the information we've collected and stored through these senses throughout our lives. Every experience we've ever had is kept for future reference - whether we know it or not - and incorporated into how our brain will respond to certain things and what decisions it will make - in other words our personalities and patterns of behaviour - what makes us us, what makes Osama Bin Laden different from Jerry Lewis or Frank Sinatra different from Timmy Mallet - are completely formed from our memories and experiences. If you look at it that way there isn't really any need for a spiritual self - many people believe that dreams are just the brain's way of sorting through and organising all the information it's taken in recently.

The frantic burst of hallucination some people experience when near to death could just be some desperate scrambled reflex as the brain attempts to find a way out of the situation, re-interpreting everything it has stored over it's life. Then, when it becomes apparent that death is inevitable, it just relaxes as much as possible, as has been reported by victims of near-drowning. They panic and fight instinctively but once they are about to die they lapse into a remarkably relaxed state.

Gaffer, I have to say I agree with you on this one.

Amanda

Woohoo!!

I know! Shockin'

Just as your experience of life has led you to think this way, mine had led me to believe something else entirely.
I prefer my scenerio, to yours and there's presently no way of telling who is correct .

Just as I said in another post, conscious records the memories and subconscious records the affects of those memories.

If you look at it the way you do, there is no need for a spiritual self.
(You mean there is a need for any kind of self ? )
We all have a spiritual self whether you like it or not.
You are using yours to make 'sense' of the unknown as you write.

Dreams are indeed the way the brain organises information, but it seems to me that it is also more than that.
What/who decides (and what is the critria for this decisions making)what get's filed as important or non important.
and to what end is this information stored ?

Like I said, everything is stored whether consciously or not. Most of it we can't even remember consciously but it's all there. This storage serves a very common and simple purpose - survival. If you try and touch something hot and it burns you, you'll remember that it hurts to touch hot stuff and, unless there's something wrong with you, you generally won't do it again. But, as with most of our instincts, this primal function has been kind of distorted with the drastic changes we have undergone over the last million years or so. Wheras when we lived in caves and chased things we wanted to eat all we had to take in was simple things like how to separate tasty flesh from inedible bone and skin, nowadays we're bombarded with all kinds of crazy, useless information. The world we live in has become incredibly complex and, as a result, so has the information we absorb and integrate, as well as the personalities that information gives rise to.

I'm not really sure what you mean by a spiritual self but all I'm doing is writing down my own thoughts on the issues I see debated by others - the thoughts I have on these subjects are, I believe, determined by the way my brain has been led to react to certain things by the information it has absorbed. Of course I believe we all have a "self" but I don't believe it has to be a spiritual thing

What do you think of as self?

Yes we all have survival memories on the simple level
Touch hot- get burnt.
Do you think the thinking and analysing of the meaning of life is also part of this survival instinct, perhaps evolved beyond it's initial use.
do you think that we are so concerned with our own survival that we even make survival after death an option?
Do we go that far?
Even the simplest organism, responds to learnt danger.
Do amoeba dream I wonder
We don't have to be quite so complicated as we are, to learn these simple facts.

what I mean by your spiritual side writing here was that you are writing on a topic called the meaning of life. Therefor you are giving thought to the complicated and mysterious.
You are responding to the question
Why?
You have come up with a non spiritual solution agreed, and if that suits your purposes and satifies your intellect on all levels than that is right for you.
but as I said previously, (somewhere) all these logical explanations based on the five senses can be thrown out the window if you ever experience the odd thing that doesn't fit the jigsaw you've made called life.
I think it must be hard to theorise on the near death experience if you haven't actually experienced one.
but if it's a comfort to you to believe that people are experiencing the normal dream patterning in death and they all expereince it the same way, even though we've decided that lives lived and memories stored make Frank Sinatra and Timmy Mallet different, and you've decided that their death must produce the same experience...then so be it