Author Topic: "The Life That We Have"  (Read 1395 times)

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Online Pandora

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"The Life That We Have"
« on: February 27, 2013, 02:50:36 PM »
Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven is a personal account of a medical doctor who came within an ace of a documented brain death yet made a full recovery. That person was Alexander himself.

Quote
While in the coma Dr. Alexander had a near death experience of startling reality and duration in which he had no awareness of his previous identity; not his name, his profession nor his memory. He instead voyaged without any apparent self-consciousness through three distinct “worlds”: “the rough, ugly Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, the idyllic Gateway, and the awesome heavenly Core”.

... The question Dr. Alexander was posing, though he didn’t cast it in my terms (he being a neurosurgeon and not a developer) was whether human beings were part of a distributed system, which we call for convenience “God”. We would still have an identify, an IP if you will, but we would also have connectivity. But connectivity to what? The God Alexander experienced was a very comforting one:

    that there is not one universe but many— in fact, more than I could conceive— but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth— no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.

... Is there in fact non-local information in the universe? Or is everyone stand-alone?

Alexander’s model is very appealing on aesthetic grounds. For the more we learn about the physical universe, the more of its subtlety and sophistication has emerged. God — or whatever you want to call it — could have created the universe as a series of standalone computing units with no network connections. But if God were half as intelligent as Vint Cerf he would not. He would wire up a network, or create something greater in concept than a network.
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Offline IronDioPriest

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Re: "The Life That We Have"
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2013, 03:15:30 PM »
I heard this fella on Dennis Prager's program a couple months back. Fascinating stuff, given his profession and his "conversion" from believing strictly in what science could prove, to measuring that against what he knows to be his personal experience.

Had I not had experiences that would appear as coincidence to anyone but me, I might be quick to question the veracity of his memory. But having had such encounters with God - miracles, or "signs" I would call them - I believe that I have no ground upon which to question another person's experiences with God. I can only absorb the tale, and wonder at His awesomeness revealed to me and to others.
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

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Offline ChrstnHsbndFthr

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Re: "The Life That We Have"
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2013, 04:06:22 PM »
I take no position on this but I found this line particularly interesting:
"The main problem he had to deal with was the inverse relationship between the depth of his disease and the richness of his experience. The ‘deader’ you were, it seemed, the more complex and information rich the near death experience became. It was the reverse of what you would expect if the experiences were conjured up by a dying brain.

That led him to posit that the human brain might be a filter, and not the exclusive source of available knowledge. It’s ability to exclude information or at least to process it in a form compatible to common experience may be at least as important as any processing functions it may perform. We experience “the world” as much by exclusion as admittance.

The deader the brain the more it would let through. And in his hopeless state Alexander was bombarded by information of some kind which his brain was unable to bar."
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Online benb61

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Re: "The Life That We Have"
« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2013, 04:46:10 PM »
I take no position on this but I found this line particularly interesting:
"The main problem he had to deal with was the inverse relationship between the depth of his disease and the richness of his experience. The ‘deader’ you were, it seemed, the more complex and information rich the near death experience became. It was the reverse of what you would expect if the experiences were conjured up by a dying brain.

That led him to posit that the human brain might be a filter, and not the exclusive source of available knowledge. It’s ability to exclude information or at least to process it in a form compatible to common experience may be at least as important as any processing functions it may perform. We experience “the world” as much by exclusion as admittance.

The deader the brain the more it would let through. And in his hopeless state Alexander was bombarded by information of some kind which his brain was unable to bar."

You know, that makes sense in a idiot savant paradigm.  So the person (Dustin Hoffman aka Ray in Rainman) has some portion of his filter damaged letting in more of this "universal truth" (the ability to instantaneously count or perceive the number of toothpicks dropped on the floor) and the rest of the brain/filter has difficulty processing the data and Ray is considered damaged because he can not completely comprehend the world around him.
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Offline Glock32

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Re: "The Life That We Have"
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2013, 05:41:14 PM »
This may be related to an article I read about 2 weeks ago, where some physicists had observed peculiar regularity to what (in theory) should be highly randomized phenomena. In their case it had something to do with the propagation of cosmic rays and radio emissions from elsewhere in the galaxy. At any rate they wondered aloud if the entire universe might not be in essence a computer simulation.  If you ever played games like SimCity or Civilization, it's easy to wonder what it would be like to live in the "universe" that you are creating and controlling.

What I find most telling, though, is that they have to come at the question from a perspective of "could it be a computer simulation", when really that's nothing more than an elaborate, materialist way of saying God's Creation.
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Online Libertas

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Re: "The Life That We Have"
« Reply #5 on: February 28, 2013, 07:14:24 AM »
This may be related to an article I read about 2 weeks ago, where some physicists had observed peculiar regularity to what (in theory) should be highly randomized phenomena. In their case it had something to do with the propagation of cosmic rays and radio emissions from elsewhere in the galaxy. At any rate they wondered aloud if the entire universe might not be in essence a computer simulation.  If you ever played games like SimCity or Civilization, it's easy to wonder what it would be like to live in the "universe" that you are creating and controlling.

What I find most telling, though, is that they have to come at the question from a perspective of "could it be a computer simulation", when really that's nothing more than an elaborate, materialist way of saying God's Creation.

Well said!   ::thumbsup::
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