Thursday, April 23, 2009

Dead as a Doornail

Here are the slides for a presentation at CSUS this week. I argue that the prospects for using out of body or near death experiences as evidence for the existence of some transcendental realm are very dim. People often have OBEs when they are clinically dead (18%!), but brain activity can continued then since "clinical death" only means that heartrate and respiration have stopped. If someone had an OBE during complete brain death, it would be important, but no one comes back from complete brain death, and even if they did we would have a Timing Problem.

Dead as a Doornail

UCDavis presentation

8 comments:

Ketan said...

Matt, I can't access the presentation from my cell phone, but anyway I don't consider near-death experience, etc. as any kind of evidence to the evidence of God. Those are the experiences conjured up by our mind in one of the most disturbed states possible--say just like after causing cannabis. Why use such recollections as grounds for anything?

Since, "transcendence" had been discussed a lot in your previous post (by respondents), I wanted to understand it in simple terms (in which I didn't find Wikipedia particularly useful). Could you please define it here plainly?

Eric Sotnak said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GrYNaaYSjs

Matt McCormick said...

Damn! Eric, that video would have been the perfect intro to my talk this week. I wish I had known about it. Mostly dead is one thing, all dead is quite another. Thanks.

MM

Anonymous said...

I dont know why atheist continue to think that "life" must exist in the flesh only. Isn't it possible that some sort of conciousness can "emerge" from various physical forces?

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