Why isn't Near Death Experience research taken more seriously?
So forgive me if this topic borders too much on religion, but this is something I've never understood.
For those who don't know what an NDE is, its a observed phenomenon where someone who is considered clinically or even full on brain dead. But then the person is revived and explains they had a sensation of floating out of their body and even observe the doctors working on them, some even claim to have heard conversations from far away, spoken with dead relatives, and some even claimed to have seen despite being blind.
Oh my god. Proof that souls exist, theologians rejoice, we have debunked materialism and proven life after death.
Only hold on not quite. No one buys it outside of a devoted few with various objections claiming it to be hallucination, the result of drugs, or even hoaxes perpetuated by the religious.
Except research conducted by men like Sam Parnia rules that out and shows that conciousness persists after death.
So.. afterlife confirmed right? No people just label Parnia crazy and continue to say this is nothing, even after the debunks fail to land. Even after this gets reported thousands of times in various regions and the only thing that changes is whether people see Jesus, Grandma, or Shiva.. aside from that little detail they remain uniform.
And well I never understood why.
I asked skeptics and they claim that the people are merely near death, not actually dead and thus it doesn't count.
Only problem is that even if the person is barely clinging onto life there's still the issue of conciousness being strong and present where none can exist.
If my computer's power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn't working. I'd consider that an oddity. I wouldn't say "Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all."
So to say "Oh they're just NEAR death." Is simply moving the goal post and not a satisfactory answer.
I ask proponents and they tell me that NDEs are completely proven and that the afterlife is for realsies, but big bad Academia won't listen to anything that contradicts a physicalist view of the universe.
The problem with that is that's the excuse creationists give as to why no one believes the Earth is 6000 years old. Which is so blatantly falsified by even a cursory glance at science that its not even funny.
So that's not it. Unless I want to entertain conspiracy nonsense. Which I do not.
So I ask the scientifically trained what the real answer is, because obviously I missed something in all the data on NDEs that I'm simply too dense to figure out.
Well, to begin with you would have to start nearly killing people. If it doesn't happen in a controller environment, the collected data doesn't mean much.
Yeah this sounds stupid but there's some scientific fields that genuinely have that problem, where experiments needed for research are deemed too dangerous and therefore criminal conduct by law. And the scientists that break laws usually do it for the money, but these fields don't make enough money for you to risk going to prison. Also who would sign up for such experiments, even if it was legal?
That's why the Nazis were absolutely vile but at the same time did boost scientific understanding through morally repulsive forced experiments on humans and weapon tests during war time.
And that's why there's good reasons to not advance that.
That’s why the Nazis were absolutely vile but at the same time did boost scientific understanding through morally repulsive forced experiments on humans and weapon tests during war time.
That gets repeated a lot, but they hardly did any actual science. A lot of it was stuff like "if we take someone with brown eyes and we put bleach in their eyes, does it turn them blue? better test a couple dozen just to be sure".
Stuff like rocketry was valuable knowledge, and didn't require being vile cunts.
Just read a little bit on it and Wikipedia disagrees.
Sometimes samples from experiments were sent over to institutes who had an interest in them. Apparently some experiments were explicitly requested by the Luftwaffe or the Kriegsmarine. Also, lots of stakeholders in the military, science and pharma industry made use of these experiments.
And more to the point of documentation for experiments, there are several accounts of prisoners describing how doctors they observed would do test and control groups and twin experiments while writing down all of their results for reporting back. Some doctors like Mengele were said to have documented their victims in minute detail.
Which is to say I'm sure some doctors were literally just doing like you are saying, with no actual scientific process, but it looks like a lot of them took their "job" seriously. This included some insights into how long it takes for death to set in in various circumstances for example or vaccine testing. Like I said, visceral but informing. Absolutely nothing that should happen anymore, but at least we have the data and knowledge.