AliEnvy
Refugee
Ok so that's not what this article is about but it IS in there.
Rather, what I found interesting was the AWARE study that will attempt to prove the separation of consciousness from the physical brain.
D'Souza's New Book Promises Proof of the Afterlife | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com
Rather, what I found interesting was the AWARE study that will attempt to prove the separation of consciousness from the physical brain.
D'Souza's New Book Promises Proof of the Afterlife | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com
The AWARE study ("Awareness During Resuscitation") is looking at "near-death experiences" (NDEs)—the recollections of people who were revived after clinical death, defined as the absence of heartbeat and the cessation of measurable electrical activity in the brain. People with NDEs sometimes report out-of-body experiences, such as looking down on themselves from above and witnessing their own resuscitations. Obviously, if this is actually taking place—and not, say, a composite reconstruction of memories drawn from years of ER episodes—then the threshold requirement for life after death has been met: the separation of consciousness from the physical brain. "Near-death experiences show that clinical death may not be the end," D'Souza writes. Thus they support his larger point, that "neuroscience reveals that the mind cannot be reduced to the brain … consciousness and free will … seem to operate outside the laws of nature, and therefore are not subject to the laws governing the mortality of the body." The latter assertion has been at the crux of Western philosophy since Plato, but it's taken until now to devise an empirical test for it. In the AWARE study, randomly generated images will be projected in the rooms of critically ill patients, in locations where they can be viewed only from above—by someone having an out-of-body experience, for instance. If patients who survive NDEs can identify these images subsequently—well, not to overdramatize, but several centuries of materialism in the natural sciences will have to be rewritten.