One Last Goodbye

[Magical Realist]

Discussion of the phenomenon of terminal lucidity from an avowed materialistic skeptic:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beri...-lucidity/

[Yazata]

Discussion of the phenomenon of terminal lucidity from an avowed materialistic skeptic:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beri...-lucidity/

I've been present when several people died and never observed terminal lucidity. The pattern usually was unconsciousness, eyes open but staring straight ahead unfocused, very labored breathing (like a steam engine) which stops abruptly. On one occasion there was what appeared to be a convulsion when breathing (and presumably heartbeat) stopped, probably a reflex brain-stem attempt to keep things going.

No heart to heart conversations or anything like we see on TV shows.

[C C]

I’m as sworn to radical rationalism as the next neo-Darwinian materialist. That said, over the years I’ve had to “quarantine,” for lack of a better word, a few anomalous personal experiences that have stubbornly defied my own logical understanding of them.

As I've mentioned in the past, there might be a fine line between events that properly belong to a systematic arrangement sanctioned by an institution and those deemed to be random or falling out of disrespected paradigms. That is to say, even the recognized "lawful" occurrences of the world might be an incredibly long sequence of coincidences made statistically possible by countless other "universes" that are less orderly and predictable. [Similar to how the reign of complex life on Earth was made likely via huge quantities of dead planets / moons and simple biotic circumstances being the case elsewhere in the cosmos.] Some of the lesser degrees of regulation and coherence -- barely holding those other "worlds" together -- might thereby also be sharing residency in our realm with its novelty of staunchly reliable principles. The results of the former infrequently rearing their heads from time to time.

Also, Kant surely wasn't the first philosopher to suggest that transcendent will could be smuggled into the appearances side of the Platonic dichotomy. What seems to be chance but isn't could still shamelessly flaunt itself in public, and yet safely be attributed to conventional processes, as attested by the the skeptics who shoot-down anomalous events by conceiving mundane explanations.

As an example in a flawed contemporary analogy (flawed in that it commits a nested Russian doll offense of repeating the same situation [space-time-causality] as a provenance for this world at a higher level)... This would consist of the authors of a virtual reality decreeing that a specific character is meant to acquire a revelation about an impending disaster so as to prevent it. But the knowledge would be converted into and delivered by the system of how that VR seems to function from the inhabitant's internal perspective; quite hidden since their science methodologies would write-it off the way Jesse Bering does any collections of unusual incidents he has personally encountered.

Speaking of Jesse Bering, we've encountered him before in shows like:

Why We Can't Imagine Death
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...r-say-die/

Reading the Minds of Dead
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/32...nt-article

Is There A God Instinct?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...sse-bering

[Secular Sanity]

Wouldn’t that be nice, CC?

I've witnessed terminal lucidity.  I’ve also experienced a handful of meaningful coincidences.  And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And then I recall all the other potential coincidences, for which my mythical meaning was unnecessary.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9oSJdSL8YOE

Freedom is frightening, eh?

[C C]

Wouldn’t that be nice, CC? I've witnessed terminal lucidity.

The deaths which I've directly observed were like Yazata's experiences. But my cousins (and the staff of the care facility at that time, I guess) attest to one my of uncles not only rousing himself from a comatose condition and conversing, but tearing monitor wires off and walking around for awhile before soon fading away for good. But it helped immensely that his brain-trauma wasn't complemented with kidney failure and respiratory problems, as with those I've been beside just prior to their demise. Easier for a champion of "Never give up!" philosophy to push up out of his mental fog and demonstrate an instance of it on and out of his death-bed when not buried under the "weight" of a multitude of additional factors.

I’ve also experienced a handful of meaningful coincidences. And I think to myself what a wonderful world. And then I recall all the other potential coincidences, for which my mythical meaning was unnecessary.

Yep, many of the streaks and chains of coincidences I've encountered didn't seem to have any personal, public, or known (to me) ideological significance, either, that I could musingly construe for them. But given this passion humans have for apprehending patterns in nature and even abstracting laws and rules from them... That entertaining exercise for disrupting periods of sleepless boredom at night eventually shifted from "meaning" to another game of whether or not they could qualify as semi-nomological patterns. A couple of notches below the reliable regularities of the cosmos (as promoted by lofty institutions) that were equally oblivious to or devoid of semantic concern for my presence or life.

In terms of supposed omens: Animals and pets suddenly suffering horrible deaths after long droughts of such affairs -- hours or mere minutes prior to 9-11 type events or family members slash local friends dying -- were completely lost on me anticipating anything else was about to happen at those times. And the "talent" we exhibit of retrospectively making associations between incidents after the later occurrences have taken place is a pretty impotent form of or advertisement for divination.

Freedom is frightening, eh?

The irony of humankind finally discerning cognitive bias at work in our interpretations of sensation, data, and memory is that such requires introduction of an "interpretation-free zone" to harbor that critical conception of what's transpiring and thereby protect the intellectual furniture of its level from the same scrutiny for paradigms which selectively filter. [i.e., "Hey you guys, we can't whack the bugbears below us on the head effectively when you're distractingly up there trying to whack us as the same!"]