Rethinking death. Apparently there was a study that I never heard of where decapitated pig heads from a slaughterhouse had an artificial circulation machine hooked up to them some hours after the decapitation, and they were able to restore normal metabolic functioning to the brains of the pigs. Apparently not all brain function, but a lot more than one would expect. The video claims the scientists downplayed this discovery, saying the dead pig brains had not been made "conscious" again.
The first half of this video, more or less, discusses scientific research, like the above study, and using stem cells from dead brains in living brains, and such. This video doesn't link to the studies but it has a list of the doctors interviewed for the videos. It might be possible to track them down.
The second half delves into "near death experiences", those experiences people have when they have cardiac arrest, but somehow manage to get rescued in the hospital and continue their lives. A phenomena I can't make heads nor tails of. These fascinate me because they seem so fundamentally different from all the other "altered states of consciousness" experiences that I know of: different from meditation, different from hypnosis, or trance states, different from "out of body experiences", different from acid trips, or other hallucinogenic drugs, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, or DMT, different from dreams, and so on. People afterwards often have major personality changes, going from, for example, being bullies to hospice workers, they change occupations, they go from organized crime to child counselor, they often lose their marriages because of personality/occupational changes, or they stay married but the marriage is completely different, etc.
But whenever I try to think about this phenomena logically, it seems to make no sense. People say when the NDE starts they float and see themselves from above, but people have done experiments, where, for example, they put signs facing up along the ceiling in operating rooms, and when someone has an NDE and says they floated above their body, they ask what the signs say and nobody ever knows that the signs say. So NDE's fail empirical tests. And some describe glimpses of past or future lives. But the human population has gone from less than a billion 200 years ago to 8 billion, so is the number of "souls" flexible -- are souls created as more people are born? Are souls destroyed? AI is about to take over the planet, and the human population will be greatly reduced, so in what human bodies would souls incarnate into? If Earth doesn't have enough room for all the souls that want to incarnate do they incarnate somewhere else in the universe? I can't figure it out. And what about the effect of my life on non-human entities? Will I have a bad life review from all the flies I've killed? What about the animals I've eaten for food?
It seems like my "consciousness" or "qualia" or "subjective experience" is the most obvious fact of my existence, so there must be some explanation for it, yet as far as I can tell from science, we're all "just" atoms, and so when I die, maybe I just don't experience anything because I don't exist any more, and that's it, and the problem is I can't imagine not existing and not experiencing anything.
You notice whenever you watch an AI talk, if there's open-ended Q&A at the end, the speaker is always asked about "consciousness". Questions like, "When will AI systems become conscious?" The correct answer to such questions is always, "Define 'consciousness'." People can't do it. People come up with hand-wavy definitions, but nothing good enough to meaningfully compare the "consciousness" of machines to humans.
Rethinking Death: Exploring what happens when we die - Parnia Lab at NYU Langone Health
