{"id":113504,"date":"2025-11-04T16:07:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T23:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=113504"},"modified":"2025-11-04T16:07:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T23:07:25","slug":"weird-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/11\/weird-right.html","title":{"rendered":"Weird, right?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Heber<\/a>
Looking eastward across the Heber Valley (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019m up in Heber, Utah, today, far removed from my normal routine and unable to devote my full attention or time to my usual activities. \u00a0So, with regard to this blog, I think that I\u2019ll return to some of my recent reading.<\/p>\n

For a number of years now, I\u2019ve been slightly troubled by accounts of distressing near-death experiences. \u00a0They\u2019re not many in number compared to the sea of relatively uniform and very positive NDEs reported by Raymond Moody in his 1975 book Life after Life<\/em> and then by a large number of other experiencers, researchers, and authors in its wake, but, still, they pose a challenge. \u00a0For one thing, they depart dramatically from the model or paradigm that Moody proposed, with its various elements (e.g., a life review, brilliant but soothing light, a tunnel, a being or beings of light, and so forth). \u00a0Moreover, they seem to offer no comforting or positive message and, strikingly, there is no obvious correlation between such distressing experiences and the moral character or the religiosity of those who report them.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve posed a particularly problematic challenge to me<\/em> because they haven\u2019t really been congruent with the fundamental point that I take away from accounts of near-death experiences overall and because, in particular, they seem inconsistent with my own religious worldview. \u00a0I haven\u2019t bothered a great deal with them because they\u2019ve struck me as anomalous and odd, but I\u2019ve certainly noticed them.<\/p>\n

So I was pleased when I ran across a plausible proposed explanation for them from Dr. Sam Parnia\u2019s book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. \u00a0<\/em>For it, he draws from two well-known major studies that he had led. \u00a0If he is correct, my problem with them is resolved:<\/p>\n

\n

In fact, soon after Moody\u2019s work was popularized, some people had arbitrarily claimed that there were distressing, negative, or hellish near-death experiences, too. But the evidence from AWARE-I (and later AWARE-II as well) showed these claims represented nothing more than frightening memories formed by people afterward when they had been disorientated and not fully awake. For instance, if doctors or nurses had been holding them down, they had mistakenly thought they were being attacked by \u201cfrightening creatures.\u201d If they had undergone a painful medical procedure, they had mistakenly thought the pain was because they were \u201cburning in hell.\u201d These were not at all like the experiences that Moody had identified. In the medical literature these experiences had been categorized as intensive care unit (ICU) delirium. But some people had arbitrarily decided to label these as frightening or hellish near-death experiences without any scientific rigor. (79)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"QEntPhGen<\/a>
An ordinary neighborhood quantum entangled photon generator. \u00a0Not the same device, but something related.
(Photo by Nate Grigg, Salt Lake City)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I also want to share with you some passages that I marked recently while reading Vasileios Basios, \u201cThe Coherence Enigma: Detecting Non-Local Consciousness Correlates via Random Events Generators (REGs) at Life\u2019s Final Edge,\u201d in Michael Nahm, Marjorie Woollacott, and Natasha Tassell-Matamua, eds., <\/span>On the Banks of the River Styx: New Perspectives on Terminal Lucidity and other Near-Death Phenomena<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The predominant theory in mainstream neuroscience is that consciousness emerges exclusively from cerebral activity. \u00a0However, an increasing amount of research suggests an even more intriguing idea: that consciousness could extend beyond the physical boundaries of the skull. \u00a0This would give rise to \u201cnon-local\u201d effects, which have the capacity to influence the physical world in small, subtle yet measurable ways. \u00a0This investigation into consciousness extends beyond theoretical speculation. \u00a0Various experiments using REGs have demonstrated the possibility that mental activity, especially intention, attention or emotion, can influence physical systems. . . .<\/p>\n

Our team\u2019s research focuses on random event generators (REGs), which use quantum mechanics to generate random numbers. \u00a0Unlike computer-generated pseudo-random numbers, these originate from electronic (Zener) diodes. \u00a0These systems are well shielded and protected against external disturbances. (180)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vasileios Basios, who studied with (among others) the 1977 \u00a0Nobel Chemistry laureate Ilya Prigogine, is a senior researcher in the Department of Physics of Complex Systems at the University of Brussels, in Belgium. \u00a0According to Dr. Basios, his team\u2019s research \u201canswered this profound question: does the transition from life to death create detectible changes in the quantum realm? The answer is in the affirmative\u201d (181). \u00a0\u201cThe findings of this investigation are both unprecedented and statistically robust\u201d (183).<\/p>\n

What happened, apparently, was that Dr. Basios\u2019s team<\/p>\n

detected measurable deviations from pure chance in the temporal vicinity of the transition from life to death of human consciousness. \u00a0The present study suggests that the dying process may create detectible ripples in the fabric of randomness itself in a form of non-local consciousness correlates. \u00a0This finding challenges our understanding of consciousness, death and even the very nature of reality\u201d (180).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe observed effect,\u201d he says,<\/p>\n

was of such potency that the overall probability of these results occurring by chance was less than 5% \u2014 thus meeting the \u201cgold standard\u201d for statistical significance in scientific research.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most intriguingly, it was discovered that approximately 25% for the ICU [Intensive Care Unit], and 28% of the hospice death cases produced what is classified as \u201chighly unlikely\u201d statistical patterns \u2014 results with false positive probabilities ranging from 0.0001 to 0.01. \u00a0From a scientific perspective, the likelihood of such patterns emerging by chance is negligible, with a probability ranging from less than one in 100 to less than one in 10,000 under typical circumstances. \u00a0Notably, these patterns manifest exclusively around the reported time of death!<\/p>\n

The rank-based analysis yielded even more striking results. \u00a0Upon examination of individual cases, researchers identified a concurrence between REG activity and recorded death events, with some of the highest daily peaks in REG activity almost coinciding with the occurrence of death. \u00a0In the dataset, four of the seven highest daily peaks on a key statistical channel occurred on days when patients died. \u00a0The probability calculations for these extreme events were found to be remarkably low, with some reaching probabilities of less than one in a million! . . .<\/p>\n

The most significant anomalies were observed within approximately six-minute periods surrounding the time of death. \u00a0(183-184)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s important to mention that, according to Dr. Basios, \u201cthe dying process remained undisturbed\u201d during his team\u2019s research. \u00a0\u201cThe REG devices operated in a passive manner, with no contact with patients or interference with medical care. \u00a0All data were anonymised.\u201d (186)<\/p>\n

Our findings carry profound implications for our understanding of both consciousness and the dying process. \u00a0These findings represent a substantial challenge to the prevailing view that the domains of mind and matter are entirely separate. \u00a0Instead, they propose a more integrated understanding, suggesting that consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality rather than merely an emergent property of complex brain activity. \u00a0(184)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m puzzled by the results that Dr. Basios reports. \u00a0Nothing in my worldview has led me to expect them, and nothing in my worldview would be adversely affected if they were to be found in error. \u00a0On the other hand, if they turn out to be well-founded, they seem rather significant to me. \u00a0Why, in a purely \u201cphysicalist\u201d world, would anything not physically connected with a biological organism be affected when that organism ceases to function?<\/p>\n

Posted from Heber, Utah<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 I\u2019m up in Heber, Utah, today, far removed from my normal routine and unable to devote my full attention or time to my usual activities. \u00a0So, with regard to this blog, I think that I\u2019ll return to some of my recent reading. For a number of years now, I\u2019ve been slightly troubled by accounts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":113507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[216,1104,5835,33642,398,39344],"class_list":["post-113504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consciousness","tag-death","tag-dying","tag-ilya-prigogine","tag-physicalism","tag-vasileios-basios"],"yoast_head":"\nWeird, right?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  I'm up in Heber, Utah, today, far removed from my normal routine and unable to devote my full attention or time to my usual activities. \u00a0So, with\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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