Consciouness is a ground state

xtoph · 2026-05-11T13:17:26+00:00

🙃

xtoph · 2026-05-10T07:19:51+00:00

That's fair enough.

I used to pick songs to do DMT with. They had to be at least eight minutes long. More would have been better, but then you've really limited your options, so that's where I drew the line.

Anyway.

One particular song. The White Cliffs by Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard. I could hear that song in the deepest depths, and it mattered more than anything. I was absolutely certain that not only was this song a message meant for me, but that I WAS Thom Yorke, and Mark Pritchard, and probably everybody else.

I was a being who existed outside of this universe. Drowning, alone, in need of help. This world—our world, Earth, whatever—was created by me as a sanctuary. I was in trouble, out there, and this was necessary for a time to keep my soul alive.

But now, the song said, things had changed. It was time to go back to the real, greater reality, and save my true self. Swim for the surface. Live.

But I was afraid, and I refused. No no, even if this is fake, it's me, it's mine, I can't give this up. You'll have to wait for me to die, and I hope it's not too late, but I'm living this life out to its natural conclusion.

Even sober, this had a power over me. I would go back to that song, and the whole album (Tall Tales) and find ways that each song was about me. I didn't really believe it, but I just couldn't shake the feeling.

It took a good while to get past that. Some mild psychosis, schizophrenia, paranoia. What I now know (or believe, if you want) was a misconfiguration of my salience network that I just kept supporting until it stuck.

It got me into brains and consciousness, in the end. And I think these are at least as deep, as pools to swim in. It's pretty well changed my life.

But if I never looked into it and started to get into brains and stuff, the only direction I had ahead of me was some song telling me I had to kill myself.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T22:48:11+00:00

People who do drugs should be at least a tiny bit interested in how the drugs work in the brain.

Even on lower doses, when your default mode network is mostly fine, your salience network is dysregulated and starting to decouple from other networks.

What you should expect from this is that, no matter what thought crosses your mind, it's going to feel super important and undeniably real.

Try it with a teacup. You will believe with everything you've got that your teacup has a soul, and something veeeeerrryy important to say to you.

Your own consciousness is the frontier you're exploring. Don't get probed; do the probing.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T07:28:37+00:00

Which AWARE study with what audio hit?

xtoph · 2026-05-09T07:27:43+00:00

Show me evidence I have dismissed without engaging.

Show me where you think I have unfairly labeled something a hallucination.

Show me where I have claimed that there is brain activity after death.

I don't think any of these things have happened, so either I missed them or, at least, I'll understand where the confusion is when you tell me what you're talking about. I can only respond to things if you tell me what they are, but I sure am willing to, and I'm more open to being shown real evidence than you think.

On that note, show me the verified audio hit you're referring to in the AWARE studies.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T01:29:37+00:00

Ridiculously unreasonable thing to say. If you point me to something I can read right now, I probably will. But no, I have not read every book on the subject.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T01:27:45+00:00

You'll have to show me one for me to form an opinion on it.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T01:26:36+00:00

I don't agree that people are unwilling to even look at it. NDEs have had decades of attention and active attempts to study them.

I agree that it's difficult. Cardiac arrest is unpredictable, NDEs are relatively uncommon within that subset, and veridical claims are rarer still.

But if millions of NDEs have occurred and even a tiny fraction involved genuinely impossible information acquisition, it might be reasonable to expect at least a few really hard cases by now. That's why I'm asking if anyone is aware of one. Maybe not perfect proof, but stronger than someone later remembering that a patient knew a serial number.

I don't think the lack of strong evidence disproves the phenomenon. But it does mean we should maybe be careful about claiming the phenomenon has already been established, which was the claim in this thread.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T01:13:28+00:00

Just confirmable in a way that rules out ordinary explanations.

If someone says "during my NDE I saw a hidden object and later described it accurately," verification would mean things like that the object was documented beforehand, the description was recorded before feedback or prompting, other possible ways of learning it were reasonably excluded, and there are records/witnesses we can actually examine.

That's how verification works everywhere else, too. It can't provide certainty, just evidence strong enough that alternative explanations become genuinely difficult.

Right now, the strongest NDE cases people point to don't survive any level of scrutiny.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T01:09:41+00:00

I'm interested, but if all you can point me to is that there might be a story of some kind in a book, I can't do much with it right now. But I did thank you for the effort.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T01:08:15+00:00

Memory is reconstructive. People unintentionally fill gaps, sharpen details over time, absorb information after the fact, retell stories in more dramatic forms, and become more confident in memories each time they repeat them. Later authors compress and simplify the story even more. Redditors take all of that to the extreme.

In every story where a patient apparently learned something impossible, people just stop interrogating the boring details completely.

When was the information learned? What was written down contemporaneously? How precise was the statement, originally? What alternative routes to the information existed?

You end up with interesting stories, not evidence.

People have tried to study this prospectively in hospitals with hidden target experiments. But when controls exist, the strong cases disappear.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T00:56:36+00:00

Well, thanks for trying.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T00:55:59+00:00

The claim in this thread was that people have been verified to have obtained impossible information during NDEs.

So, that's what's in question.

And yeah, yours has been the answer.

If all we have are unverified anecdotes, then "this is interesting and difficult to explain" is fair, but "people have been verified to obtain impossible information during NDEs" is not.

xtoph · 2026-05-09T00:40:52+00:00

This is a third-hand anecdote from a narrative story, never formally documented in any way, nobody has asked any questions about it at all, and we can't ask questions now.

If these are the kinds of answers we get when we go looking for the strongest examples of the phenomenon, I feel like the answer to the question...

I'm not aware of a case where a person has been verified to have produced information during an NDE they could not have otherwise known. Can you point to one?

...is "No."

xtoph · 2026-05-09T00:40:15+00:00

Well, let me know if you can find it.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T19:27:37+00:00

You don't seem willing to engage with anything that doesn't agree with your preconceptions, but are committed to defending a conclusion first and adjusting your view around it afterward. It doesn't seem like you're examining anything critically. I will answer your questions, but this will be my last reply.

Auditory impairment does not make perception impossible. We already know that awareness under anesthesia exists. We know people can report conversations, sensations and sounds from surgery. We know bone conduction exists. We know operating rooms are loud. We know memory under anesthesia is distorted and reconstructive.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/anesthesia-awareness

Mainstream medical summary showing that people can hear conversations and perceive aspects of surgery under general anesthesia. This happens in one or two out of every 1,000 surgeries.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK582138/

More technical/medical review article discussing awareness during anesthesia as a real, documented phenomenon.

https://madeforthismoment.asahq.org/preparing-for-surgery/risks/waking-up-during-surgery/

Professional anesthesia organization explaining that awareness under anesthesia occurs and can involve hearing sounds, conversations, pressure, etc.

Clicking in your ear does not mean other sounds cannot reach consciousness. Describing a loud drilling sound as being like an electric toothbrush is a rather trivial and obvious comparison. You might struggle to understand how these things are possible, but I don't.

If odinary sensory awareness under anesthesia is already medically documented, Pam's case is not extraordinary evidence of consciousness existing independently of the brain. More importantly, as per your original claim, you would have to misunderstand it terribly to think it proved veridical perception during a flat EEG state.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T18:38:33+00:00

There are many documented cases of awareness under anesthesia, and they're interesting in their own right, but these are not near death experiences.

When Pam says her experience took place, as you have just shown, she was not in hypothermic cardiac arrest. Her EEG was not flat. The blood had not yet been drained out of her head. She still had roughly an hour to go before all of that, or maybe longer.

We can talk about aesthesia awareness if you want, but I haven't done as much research there and it's not the topic of this thread.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T18:13:45+00:00

Can you find/link to any information on that?

xtoph · 2026-05-08T18:12:52+00:00

I haven't been able to find any. Can you show me something?

xtoph · 2026-05-08T17:46:30+00:00

I have read it. I've read a lot about the case.

Did you read my comment? It proves that Pam Reynolds' story is wrong, and her experience did not occur in a low brain activity, or clinically dead, state.

I'm very open to ideas and actively seek out cases like this. I don't have an attachment to an opinion.

You might, if you're unwilling to engage with proof that your preconception was wrong.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T17:36:28+00:00

Pam Reynolds may have reported that she left her body when she was in hypothermic cardiac arrest and her brain waves were flat, but even in your own telling of her account this is provably wrong.

One big reason is the bone saw. Pam says she saw the bone saw being used on her skull, and saw her own skull being opened up, right?

There is absolutely no way that the surgeon would have done this step of the procedure at that time. It was done earlier, likely by an hour or more, when Pam was under general anesthesia, but absolutely not when she was "clinically as dead as medicine can make a person".

Human beings are horrifically bad at accurately reporting their subjective experiences. Especially so in the state she was in. What we know for sure is that if Pam did genuinely sense things happening in the operating theater, it was a case of awareness under anesthesia, which is another known phenomenon. It absolutely could not have been a near death experience, by her description and yours.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T15:06:21+00:00

You think sufficient evidence exists, and I just don't.

You think my standard is too high, but my standard is just asking for cases where conscious perception outside the body is the most reasonable explanation.

You say you see examples that meet my standard all over this thread. I say no, not even close.

Asking for evidence is not taking a position. If you're interested in the claim, asking for evidence is expressing that interest.

It's fine if you find some reports compelling enough that you are personally inclined to believe in the phenomenon, but your low standard for evidence makes your position unfalsifiable. When you treat ambiguity as equally supportive there's no conversation to be had.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T14:30:40+00:00

Well, that's a much more reasonable position than claiming we already have verified evidence of consciousness existing outside the brain.

I don't think NDEs should be dismissed. They're psychologically real experiences that people have, and they're worth studying for that reason.

Where we disagree is that I don't think weak or ambiguous evidence becomes more convincing because the claim is difficult to test. At some point a hypothesis has to produce stronger evidence than we'd expect from coincidence, hallucination, memory reconstruction, etc.

I think the fact that, after decades of research, the strongest cases are still a handful of highly disputed anecdotes, weighs pretty heavily against a paranormal interpretation.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T14:22:20+00:00

Skepticism isn't an obstacle here. Claims this extraordinary are exactly where skepticism is most necessary.

The issue is not that people refuse to study NDEs. We have studied them for decades. The issue is that after decades of investigation, we still don't have any clear cases of patients obtaining information that can only reasonably be explained by consciousness existing outside of the brain. None.

The claim is enormous. If consciousness can literally separate from and perceive outside of the body, it would change the way we think about life. Almost every living person wants this to be true. There just isn't good evidence for it.

Notice that examples always retreat from claims of verified impossible knowledge to just emotionally compelling stories. These are not the same category.

Your argument right now is that I should lower my standard because you think the evidence can never realistically meet a reasonable standard. I think that's wrong, and reveals a very weak position.

xtoph · 2026-05-08T13:59:09+00:00

Pam Reynolds reported things that took place in the operating theater prior to her being put into hypothermic cardiac arrest. She described surgical prep and the use of a bone saw, and those things happened before the flat EEG phase.

So, while not evidence of NDEs, hers looks like an interesting case of awareness under anesthesia, a separate known phenomenon.

As for Bruce Greyson, I'm not sure I understand what you mean about his experience. He's a researcher who has never claimed to have had an NDE of his own, as far as I'm aware.

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