Science Attempts To Explain Heaven 692
Hugh Pickens writes "Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek about the thesis that heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event, but rather something that happens in your brain as you die. The thesis is based, in part, on a growing body of research around near-death experience. According to a 2000 article by Bruce Greyson in The Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had an NDE. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details, describing: a tunnel, a light, a gate or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed. Scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism when, in order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory has gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic. 'I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God,' wrote one user of his experience under ketamine. 'Dante said it better,' writes Miller, 'but the vision is astonishingly the same.'"
Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
How did they explain the out-of-body visions experienced by people who were born blind (and then actually saw things when their heart stopped beating)?
Brain matter is highly plastic (Score:5, Interesting)
Blind people still "see." Brain pathways have simply been remapped so that the "vision" parts of the brain are now associated with other senses.
If you blindfold yourself, and navigate the world by touch, you will still instinctively build a "picture" of the world around you. The spatial cognitive portions of your brain that are usually excited by vision, will come to be associated with touch, or other senses. After years, your neural pathways will remap themselves.
In people who are born blind, those spatial picture generating portions of their brain are still functional, but more closely attuned to nonvisual senses. So they can still "see" in that they generate a spatial impression of the world around them.
They've done experiments with artificial vision systems based on the receptors in your tongue, remapping and training the brain to "see" via your tongue's tactile receptors rather than your eyes.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Always disturbs me to explain religion (Score:3, Interesting)
I think real scientists should stay well away from this kinda crap, if you got to research what happens when people die, don't link it to heaven.
It is like "scientist" trying to explain Bible myths. How could Moses have parted the seas, what could have caused the plagues etc.
That is like a bad episode of myth-busters where they test movie stunts. What they do first is try to convince people that a scene in the movie is somehow real and has to follow real world physics and then disprove it... learn to seperate fantasy from reality for Christ damn, for god's sake oh fuck it.
All the happenings in the Bible can be explained very simply if you think of it as a bunch of Fantasy written by people who wanted to create a religion. There is even clear evidence that the Bible is fabricated. Even its followed accept that the New Testament was created from seperate books, edited with some parts and books left out completely. So we know that it is edited. No truly religious person would dare to edit the word of god, so what made the person who edited the new testament decide to think he could do this?
And low and behold, if you think of it as a bad hack job, then suddenly it all makes sense. And we know religions can be entirely fabricated. Scientology anyone?
It is amusing to see a program on trying to explain the story around Moses, when nothing in the historical record mentions this at all. Explain the parting of the red seas, but not why an exodus of slaves was not mentioned in Egyptian records. Now that is science. Up next, myth-busters and the geographic channel examine how a grandmother and a little girl can fit in a wolves stomach whole. Leave your brain at the door.
How I faced my death (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So many things wrong with the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry about replying to myself, but the following quote of a statement made by the researcher referred to in the article that conducted the ketamine experiments is relevant to this discussion:
Dr. Jansen has the following to say about the journal article that follows:
'I am no longer as opposed to spritual explanations of these phenomena as this article would appear to suggest. Over the past two years (it is quite some time since I wrote it) I have moved more towards the views put forward by John Lilly and Stan Grof. Namely, that drugs and psychological disciplines such as meditation and yoga may render certain 'states' more accessible. The complication then becomes in defining just what we mean by 'states' and where they are located, if indeed location is an appropriate term at all. But the apparent emphasis on matter over mind contained within this particular article no longer accurately represents my attitudes. My forthcoming book 'Ketamine' will consider mystical issues from quite a different perspective, and will give a much stronger voice to those who see drugs as just another door to a space, and not as actually producing that space'.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
How did they explain the out-of-body visions experienced by people who were born blind (and then actually saw things when their heart stopped beating)?
Blind people are quite capable of 'seeing' things. A blind persons brain may be more re-wired to take input from the other senses but indeed the visual parts of their brains are still intact.
I have a family member, blind from birth, who believes what she 'sees' in her imagination to be what sight would be like. Indeed she thinks she sees colors in her dreams, and can give a good verbal description of colors and what objects would be that color. Usually quite to the surprise of a sighted person assuming a blind persons world is all black.
You point suggests that the science here can't account for that anecdotal evidence, but anecdotally... blind people see colors on LSD and other halluciogens.
In much the same way being hypnotized once made me realise just how tenuous our grasp on reality is, my personal experiences of hallucinogens (er 100% legal of course) means I dismiss near death experiences out of hand.
Re:Brain matter is highly plastic (Score:1, Interesting)
Experiments? Try commercial technology. http://vision.wicab.com/technology/ [vision.wicab.com]
Re:So many things wrong with the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Far from it being horseshit. This line of study is taking shots at the "horseshit" that is the evidence for there being a god and a soul/spirit. For many people, these near-death experiences are their primary evidence of the existence of a god and that they have an eternal spirit/soul. By explaining yet another "supernatural phenomenon" with science, we continue to chip away at the god myth. Birds once flew because it was god's will. The sun travelled around the earth because it was god's will. Animals all over the planet were the product of "spontaneous generation." Illness was caused by the invasion of demons and evil spirits into our bodies. (And saying "bless you" after a sneeze kept them from re-entering!) Do I really need to list all the nonsense that scientific understanding had cleared away from our beliefs?
We are still clinging to supernatural beliefs though. Many of us still believe in faith healing. Many more still believe that good fortune will come to them if they give money to their church leaders. Many people believe it is acceptable to criticise sexual orientation (which is a fact of nature just like sex and race are) while at the same time, criticism of religion is beyond reproach.
Religion is nothing more than a reality distortion field and the sooner we clear it away from the mind of man, the sooner we can become more than we are today and stop holding ourselves back.
After death studies on live people? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Science = religion (Score:5, Interesting)
Science makes no claims towards what it is not. Science comes with error bars. Science tells us, "This is exactly how wrong I am." Science takes your pet theory, that really elegant one that you WANT to believe is Truth, and tells you, no, there's no strong correlation. That is the morality of science. When you do an experiment, and determine that your hypothesis is unsupported, you pick a different hypothesis, not a different experiment.
Yes, sometimes scientists seem like they are stumbling about in the dark. They might pick the wrong conclusion. But science is based around revisiting prior assumptions and refining them as you gather more data. What religion has such a mechanism built in? What religion describes how to amend its holy books in the event that they are demonstrated incorrect?
You're right that science takes away beliefs. But it can only harm false beliefs. How could you use science to demonstrate something incorrect? That is the strength of explaining everything from the ground up. There is a strong foundation, not based on strength of faith, but rather on a series of repeatable experiments. If you take issue with how an experiment was done, do it yourself. If you get different results, publish them. The scientific community thrives on that. If you get the same results, know that the truth of the matter has nothing to do with how willing you are to stomach it.
The one thing I will grant you is that the media does a very poor job of representing the scientific process. These scientists did not prove that there is no heaven; they did not set out to, and their experiment is not set up in a way to demonstrate that fact one way or another. What they can demonstrate is that a chemical released by the brain under extreme duress can produce strong hallucinations accompanied by a feeling of the numinous. That's not terribly exciting in and of itself, so the press fancies it up, makes the bold claims that science cannot, and releases it in comprehensible chunks to the public.They have a difficult job, trying to represent incredibly technical work to a public without the background to understand it, and often having to make it entertaining as well. Much is lost in the translation.
Re:Props for trying! (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, if life is hard here because God gave us Free Will, but Heaven is Perfect with no pain. Doesn't that mean there's no free will there? And wouldn't that be way worse than life here? Are you really YOU without the ability to make your own choices?
I think there are a few people who would be comforted to know that they would no longer be capable of bad decisions. To view it another way; everyone finally knows _why_ all the bad decisions are bad, and thus do not choose them.
If he lets us keep our freewill, and only lets people in who won't make things bad, than wouldn't that mean a pleasant personality trumps true acts of good? Would you rather have an asshole cop who saves lives every day, or a guy who makes witty comments and makes everyone laugh?
Acts of good are just that; actions; singular events. If Heaven is eternal, I'd rather have a mousy guy who makes everyone laugh than an asshole who saves lives. To be eternally annoyed by an asshole sounds like hell. Oh, and saving lives isn't much use somewhere where everyone's dead (or living forever).
Re:finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
If NDE's can be explained by chemical reactions, that means there's no evidence for heaven right? And even if we assume heaven exists, there is no longer any reason to believe we actually go there when we die (since obviously you can't be experiencing a NDE and be in heaven at the same time, since the NDE is all in you brains).
Surely this research says something about heaven: it tells us that an NDE is not part of heaven (when previously some people believed it was).
Re:Always disturbs me to explain religion (Score:3, Interesting)
ask yourself, "why am i me, and not someone else". that question leads onto others like "how am i able to know this is me". I could totally understand a state of just not existing.
the authors seem to be explaining ketamine (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly, one of the study authors at least is taking this the other way. Rather than taking the similarity between NDEs and ketamine experiences as evidence that NDEs aren't spiritual, he's taking it as evidence that ketamine experiences are spiritual, just like NDEs. It's not clear as a whole that explaining NDEs was even the goal: for at least one of them, it seems that explaining ketamine experiences was the goal.
Re:Colour me skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
What? You supposedly study religions and missed the prevalence of "good light"/etc., reunification with ancestors, a path and border point (remember, they can have differing forms depending on the culture) imagery?...
(1) "Light is good" needs no religion to explain. But it's clear that something so valuable would attain religious significance, without the need to consider NDEs. (Sun)light, well, sheds light on things - it gives you warmth, it makes your plants grow, it comforts you by allowing you to see danger, it allows you to substitute knowledge for ignorance.
(2) "I'd like to reunite with my dead ancestors" needs no religion to explain. But it's clear that a feeling of loss so strong would attain religious significance, without the need to consider NDEs. You're also missing out the heap of mythology which certainly doesn't tell you you'll reunite with all your ancestors - including Christianity.
(3) Between zone A and zone B there is intuitively a border. Every religion/mythology defines the life/death border differently, and some of it has nothing to do with stepping into light - you might have to cross a river, negotiate with dogs, have your body sailed into an ocean so your spirit can be released, be wrapped for preservation - whatever earthly tools and concepts were important to that culture over time would end up being woven into a mythology.
But, hell, if light/comfort/understanding is good, and darkness/scariness/ignorance is bad, why wouldn't you think of your afterlife as bright, and talk of stepping into the light? There's no need to consider NDEs.
The article's hypothesis prompts more questions than it provides answers (which is good). For example, what accounts of NDEs are there prior to a couple of centuries ago, and do they reflect what people /expect/ to happen when they die - i.e. are they uniform across cultures?
Re:finally... (Score:4, Interesting)
> As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Yes... and by that logic every lightning strike that we don't measure may have been magical and thrown by Thor, and it's just that sometimes lightning is caused by electricity and those are the only ones we've measured.
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly. They're free to pump some people full of chemicals that instantly break down ketamine and then almost kill those people (that'd be an interesting if somewhat immoral experiment) and see if any NDE's occured.
> Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat?
Well, I believe there is a lot of evidence that suggests not eating causes those chemical reactions, and no evidence that it is caused by some supernatural afterlife. Obviously we could use chemicals to make someone hungry even if they eat enough... but I fail to see how that proves food doesn't exist.
Re:Science = religion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
As an experienced ket tripper, I've been in a lot of mindsets going into a trip. I've had beautiful experiences that have changed me for the better, and I've had some trips to hell that have been ugly and scary. The connections to archetypes are always pretty pronounced on this drug. I've never had that happen consistently on other psychedelics like mushies.
I think the researchers should look specifically at 5-MeO-DMT, since that is actually produced by the body and is a potent psychedelic. I believe it has a direct connection to these NDEs.
Re:finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly.
No you're missing the point. The religionists don't have to argue any such dualism. They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine, and it's the ketamine that produces the qualia, the experience. They can argue that the experience can be artificially induced by introducing ketamine, but that says nothing about the supposed "natural" phenomenon.
Absolutely every experience we have come down to chemical actions in the brain. The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience, and it's bad science -- going beyond the observations -- to pretend that it does. The interesting debate here is not about religion at all, it's about the nature of consciousness itself.
Re:Heres an NDE question (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, I'm willing to bet this is what gives you the 6 minutes you can survive when your brain is deprived from oxygen. Or at least the last minutes.
Sure it won't help hallucinating before dying, but if you are to come back from oxygen deprivation, you might be happy that your brain chemically switched in safe mode. The remaining question being, where does it dump the data ?
Finally, I'm really sorry I can't find the article again. One of my teachers when I was studying (Pr Dreyfus from the espci, Paris) explained this theory that the NDE hallucination is the output with no input of a stressed neuron network (the resonance of the brain, if you will). And by modeling it in silico he was coming up with images from the "would-be-interpreted-signals" that looked a lot like tunnels to me.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in a very serious car accident and went... well, not to Hell maybe, but somewhere quite unpleasant. I am an atheist so I don't think the experience was particularly significant, although it is just about the strangest thing I have ever experienced. I very much felt like I had spent a timeless eternity "somewhere else", but there was no bright light and all that, it was a dark and nasty place.
Hell is described often as "the outer darkness where men weep" or "outside". A place where God is not; the place where He allows souls to go if they truly do not want to be with Him.
Re:finally... (Score:3, Interesting)
You yourself said ketamine (or the mechanism that produces ketamine) could be the mechanism that god uses (I assume you mean the mechanism would bring us to heaven, else I think we can conclude that NDEs are unrelated to heaven?). How would triggering that mechanism (possible if it is nonmagical) not bring a person to heaven?
And what if we find that the the mechanism that triggers the ketamine is, let's say, lack of oxygen, would you conclude that heaven produces hypoxia? What if we find the hypoxia is caused by lack of circulation and/or breathing? Would we conclude those things are caused by heaven? The whole thing sounds absurd to me.
Re:After death studies on live people? (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple, the "electrical waves" to which you refer are the propagation of ion current flows, esp. Na+ and K+ along the neurons in the brain. Just because one cannot detect such propagation of local charge differentials does *not* mean that all chemical activity, esp. the pumping of Na+/K+ due to local ATP pools has ceased. Indeed if one's brain is not *FROZEN* there is going to be chemical activity (there is probably even some chemical activity above liquid nitrogen temperatures) -- which may be a reason why one can get better brain recovery even with no heartbeat and no electrical activity if one cools it down before attempting a reboot. (Brain rebooting is a complex interaction of proper chemical reactions and improper (harmful) chemical reactions.)
The problem is with the current definition of "DEAD" [1]. You are not DEAD until the information content (organization) of ones brain has been damaged beyond the capability of any technology to recover. Currently the two most probable (frequent) methods for making one really dead are disassembly by incineration (cremation) and disassembly by consumption (allowing fungi/bacteria to consume a body). The next most common methods probably involves brain crushing injuries such as in earthquakes, industrial accidents, etc.
So long as proper brain (neuronal) organization exists and most of the proper cellular structure is in place YOU ARE NOT DEAD -- you are simply "shut-down". I've got a 10+ year old 8086 based computer sitting downstairs. It runs either Windows 98 or Linux depending on how I boot it. It isn't normally "dead", its simply "off". You should read a bit more about brain/neuron physiology and cell biology to understand this. Also education regarding cryonic preservation and the future capabilities offered by robust molecular nanotechnology would be useful.
1. The current definition of "dead" and therefore "NDE" is based on the very limited definition roughly equal to "beyond the probable restoration of significant levels of functioning using *currently* known medical technologies" [2].
2. If one is cynical about it one might consider how prevalent the trend is to promote declaring people with fully organized brains as "dead" so as to enable the harvesting of organs for organ transplants (which surgeons and hospitals do make money from). In contrast an alternative would be to have both the supposedly "dead" individual as well as the individual(s) likely to die should they not receive an organ transplant undergo cryonic suspension [3].
3. A third nearer term alternative, which is currently unapproved, would be hydrogen sulfide "anesthetic" preservation which appears to have certain "suspended animation" properties (may retard overall metabolic rate) and thus give people an increased opportunity for technology to "catch up" with their condition(s).
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me assume that you mean the community of scientists, professionals and journals, along with their corpus of work, when you speak of "science". True, there exists people who dogmatically worships their publications. True, people make mistakes with their hypotheses and on occasion, the rest doggedly follow. And true, there can be abuses of science by deviants like the upper class and their eugenics.
But when you make such an argument representing science as a divorced dogmatic institution akin to the Catholic Church, it is immediately obvious that you are spoon-fed the religious spin of your brethren. For the doctor you go to when you are unwell is a person who worships "science". The engineer who built your buildings unquestioningly believes that the the more arcane portions of the physics he employs is correct. The doctor and the engineer, whom without modern society would be lapsed back into Medieval times. While the frontier of science is uncertain and suspect to the ethos of the Circle of Eminent Scientists Colloquially Called Science Itself, as evidences are acknowledged and cumulated, once enough eyes are poured over it, the bugs of the Scientific Canon are ironed out.
Now, you can't do that with your Biblical Canon, can you? Oh, no, wait; you can! For in Early Christianity the Gnostics, once regarded as the most prestigious of Christian communities, were deemed heretics; for in their rare insight they thought the God of the Old Testament to be too cruel to be the God whom Jesus spoke of as benevolent and forgiving. Goodbye Gnostics, your wisdom, and your literature! A millenium later, when the Protestant Church was excommunicated, they threw away the canon that they deemed unreliable. Goodbye beloved Apocrypha! Every church has their own impeccable canon. The ridiculousness of it! But what no church can do is to reach a consensus as to what the definitive canon is. Without the evidence of countless experiments and studies given to canonical scientific models by "science", even mainstream churches have irreconcilable differences. Ultimately, the religion that you devotedly worship is but a text, a tradition, and a specific, geographically-bound set of dogmatic interpretations of that canon in its happy apologiae. Science, on the other hand, is universally practiced, and the mainstream never fail to debate, listen, comment and adapt, and provide ideas for engineers to improve our quality of life.
But I digress. By far the most important line of separation between science and religion is that the science, as an institution of many specializations provides us with choices and freedom while religion, in its many diverse institutions refining the sole spiritual, or shall we say, behavioral aspect of life, strives to limit the freedom of its adherents. This is perhaps the point that leads many moral men to be atheists. Take abortion for example. Science had allowed women to have safe abortions, giving them an option and the freedom to not bear a child whom they may not love or be able to provide for due to the grim realities of life. A woman can still choose not to abort. The Catholic Church, however, begs to differ. Its hierarchy of celibate and sexually frustrated priests does not sympathize with their plight, even as it attempts to cover up its molestation scandals. The devout is left to live in grievous sin, shall one decide to abort; or in shame or poverty or suffering, shall one choose the other.
Can you still call science a religious institution?
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:After death studies on live people? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who are these MDs, that moderated the above comment?
The flat line you see on the machinery during NDE is the heart that stops pulsing.
Brain activity stops within 3 minutes after clinical death but it is still possible to revive the brain tissues up to around 10-20 minutes after the blood stops oxygen flow to the brain, though most likely it will be completely damaged.
To say that there is no electrical activity in the brain is to make a statement that the brain is dead. Once the brain is dead it cannot be brought back to life, so the above comment is ignorant.
Re:So many things wrong with the article (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why people should be allowed to vote on discretionary budget items. What a Christian is saying when they oppose embryonic stem-cell research is, "I think that this is immoral, and I do not want my tax money to be spent on it." I feel the same way about war, and would really like to be able to say to the government, "you may not spend my money killing people."
Others feel that war, or embryonic stem cell research, or whatever, are good things and would vote to spend their money that way. But because right now all the money comes out of the same pot, and nobody gets to say "don't spend it this way," anybody who is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, or war, has to demand that the research, or the fighting, simply not be done at all.
It's not that their wishes trump yours. It's that because it all comes out of one pool, the decision has to be all or nothing.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
How I got to that conclusion to was by reading up on religions and reading the texts like the bible. The bible is actually quite interesting and there are some very good ideas in it. But most practitioners of their religion pick and choose bits or want to stick in their head in the sand about the fact the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions are so similar and all three borrow bits from previous religions. Where as the wise thing would be to say there reason for all the similarities are that the fundamentals are true and they've just come out differently due to human interpretation and therefore embrace the other religions rather than act as if they are your worst enemy.
It's not that hard to see that America's "Christian" right and their beliefs do not match Jesus' teachings and beliefs. For starters the bible is quite clear that you shouldn't be a loud mouth religious jerk and that your connection to the lord should be private.
There is also the fact that the free market capitalist system ironically matches the evolutionary theory and not Christianity. It's all about survival of the fittest. Not wanting to share some of your wealth so others can have healthcare falls under greed which is a sin and the bible repeatedly blasts the rich and wealthy. After all it's apparently easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven and the bible states you can't serve two masters, the lord and mammon (money).
So therefore the whole basis of being a Christian conservative is complete and utter BS.
I'd go out of my way to help out someone who truly followed the word of Christ. I think for someone to sit down and actually read the bible and do their best to follow it to the letter is very admirable. By that I mean the important bits about helping your fellow man and not being a greedy douche. But there in lies the problem, I've not really met anyone like that and I've certainly not seen them on TV.
It's easy for people to say that Muslims need to tackle their extremists (which they should) but Christians have the same exact problem and they need to start standing up and condemning those who don't follow the bible properly rather than paying Sarah Palin to read a speech off her hand.