I just had this thought. So suppose you die. From anything but brain trauma. What indicates death? Your heart stops. What does that mean? You can't get oxygen. Does it make sense that your entire body would become dead when one organ fails? Or even a couple? I venture a "no." So you're dead. But...your brain still relays information from the outside world into your brain. You may hear the people around you. You may see them. You may sense things in other ways. As you run out of oxygen and blood-renewed resources in you brain, you neurons become less and less able to relay information. Perhaps you feel like you are floating away, as the sensory input grows fainter. Perhaps after a little while, the last impulses your dying brain communicates are blurry fields of light, seemingly at the end of a tunnel, but merely the distorted view of the world from wherever you are. What do you think?
I've had 3 near deaths. One time i got hit by lightning, one time i totalled a car and it was a 'miracle im alive' and one time i got hit by a car. im either really unlucky, or really lucky whichever way you wanna see it. Each of the three times it just went white and i was standing face to face with a man i didnt recognize and it totally threw me out, this man was in a white robe and then suddenly his face was turning into a lion and back into a human again. Back then i was a complete atheist and didnt believe anything and i never thought much of it other then that i was just dreaming or something. But to see the same guy doing the same things 3 times :huh: sort of too much coincidence for me. Then a couple years later i came across bob marley one day after never hearing any of his music, it interested me so i found out alot about rasta, saw a picture of jah rastafari and was instantly converted. He was the man i saw every time. I believe that when 'scientifically' you should be dead that your consciousness actually meets with the almighty and he decides whether your time is up or not. I know i've still got work to do here, so here is where i stay. Near-deaths are really mind awakening.
Having never had a near death experience, I can't say what I'd think. There was a report on the Discovery Channel about a quasi-scientific experiment demonstrating that consciousness does persist for some time after death. The great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered and named oxygen, formulated the law of conservation of mass, and developed the metric system, was sentenced to the guillotine in 1794 during the French Revolution. Scientist that he was, he reportedly arranged to have an assistant monitor his execution to determine how long he could keep blinking a code after his head was severed from his body. According to the story, he got off fifteen to 20 blinks after his head left his neck! I find that hard to believe, but if it happened, he's got to be the most dedicated scientist in history.