23AR28-44

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AR 28:44 - NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES - "not hallucinations"

In this issue:

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES - New study: "These are not hallucinations. These are very real experiences that occur in death."

TECHNOLOGY - "the control of human nature"

Apologia Report 28:44 (1,641)
December 30, 2023

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

"There is life after death: Revived patients share out-of-body experiences in startling NYU report" by Marc Lallanilla (New York Post, Sep 15 '23) -- "Typically, doctors have assumed there is little to no brain activity after about 10 minutes of cardiac arrest, when the heart stops beating, depriving the brain of oxygen.

   "However, the new research from NYU turns that misconception on its head.

   "'There are signs of normal and near normal brain activity found up to an hour into resuscitation,' Dr. Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health, told The Post in a wide-ranging interview. ...

   "Parnia is the lead author of a study published this week <www.tinyurl.com/yc8nht8h> in the journal Resuscitation that studied brain activity and awareness among 53 patients who survived cardiac arrest at 25 hospitals, mostly in the US and UK.

   "The researchers were able to show that the brain is surprisingly more durable than most doctors had previously believed. ...

   "One of the most common shared experiences among people who have been revived following cardiac arrest is a 360-degree awareness of the space around them. ...

   "'Somehow in death their entire life comes to the fore,' said Parnia. 'It's a deep, purposeful and meaningful reevaluation of their lives.'

   "This review of their lives isn't in any particular order, Parnia said, but more of a dive into morality and ethics. 'It's not a chronology. It's a purposeful reevaluation of the things that we strive for in life, like a promotion at work.

   "'What becomes a primary reality is how we treat other people,' added Parnia, who is also director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone Health. 'It's not random flashbacks. There's so much more.' ...

   "'Normally, there are braking systems that keep us from accessing all aspects of our brain,' Parnia explained. 'The rest of the functions of your brain are dampened.'

   "But, 'as the brain shuts down, as a defense mechanism to preserve itself [during cardiac arrest], the brakes are off.' 

   "That's when people 'get activation of other parts of the brain that have been dormant. You get access to your entire consciousness and things that you normally can't access, all of your emotions, feelings, thoughts and memories.

   "'These are not hallucinations. These are very real experiences that occur in death,' Parnia added.

   "The research being conducted at NYU Langone Health and other research centers represents a breakthrough in resuscitation, a specialty that has lagged behind other areas of medical research." <www.tinyurl.com/3vjdztxv>

 ---

TECHNOLOGY

"The Digital Apocalypse Is Here: Reading Anton Barba-Kay on the Meaning of Online Culture" by Rod Dreher (European Conservative, Sep 19 '23) -- "Digital culture tells you that your will is, or should be, unencumbered by history, materiality, or any unchosen obligation. ...

   "The concluding scene in Mel Gibson's 2006 action-adventure film Apocalypto is one of the most stunning endings in cinema history. ... In a single awe-inspiring moment, the Age of the Conquistadores arrives, rendering the struggles among the Mayans more or less irrelevant.

   "That's how I felt after finishing A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, a new book by American philosopher Antón Barba-Kay. <www.tinyurl.com/mr2ap7tu> ...

   "The philosopher Matthew B. Crawford has argued persuasively for modern people to return to 'the world beyond your head,' to cite the title of his 2015 book exhorting readers to pay attention to the non-digital world.

   "Barba-Kay agrees, I think, but his book is a powerful argument for the inevitability of the digital transformation of the human. To be clear, he does not agree that the future is determined. But A Web Of Our Own Making delves deeply into the unique nature of digital technology, and how it seduces humanity by offering us the apparent 'gift' of total control over our selves and over our world. ...

   "Why is digital culture so different from other technologies? Because, argues Barba-Kay, it acts directly upon us to capture and control our attention, and promising us that we can control the world by controlling our experience of the world. 'Digital technology is a spiritual technology,' he writes. Why? Because 'the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.' ...

   "Digital technology has ... so changed human life within a couple of decades that teens are today growing up in an altogether new cultural environment - with different expectations, habits, and standard points of orientation from their parents'. There is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt. ...

   "The digital is the advent of a new religion - not literally, but effectively. We live in a culture that considers technological advancement to be the greatest measure of progress. If we associate perfection with divinity, then, he writes, 'digital technology will continue to occupy a role undeniably analogous to that of religion in other ages.' ...

   "It's like this: in ages past, one became a Self to the extent one was like God. In the Christian view, the more like Jesus Christ one became, the more fully human. In the twentieth century, though, Religious Man (to use the sociologist Philip Rieff's term) gave way to Psychological Man. That is, instead of looking outside the Self for meaning and self-definition, people began to look inside themselves, picking and choosing from strategies that brought them pleasure, or at least relief from their psychological and emotional anxieties.

   "We have seen the all-too-predictable collapse of authoritative religious traditions, which have been supplanted by pick-and-choose, individualistic bricolages. Now, in the digital age, that approach to identity has become the norm; our most powerful technology reinforces its seeming reality, and the pick-and-choose approach to reality (or rather, 'reality'). ...

   "Barba-Kay explains how classical liberal assumptions, and the institutions and practices that grew out of them, are artifacts of a culture dominated by the printing press. They will not survive digital culture, he predicts.

   "In my own research this past year into the nature of religious enchantment, I have learned that attention is the key factor. Barba-Kay seems to agree - and that, he says, is why the digital is so radical. ...

   "The seduction of the digital is that it offers us a similar kind of deliverance from self-awareness, including the unbearable burden of boredom, with no effort at all. ...

   "In digital culture, by contrast, time is neither acknowledged nor redeemed, but effectively denied. The speed of digital culture embodies what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called 'liquid modernity': the sense that nothing is solid anymore, that everything changes before it has the chance to firm up.

   "'When technology forces cultural changes faster than culture can accommodate them,' writes Barba-Kay, 'it is destructive to the possibility of culture itself - since nothing in practice is allowed the time to coalesce, to take shape and adapt.'

   "Worse, if we can't imagine a past, we won't be able to imagine a future. ...

   "What we face now is an enormous religious temptation. For Barba-Kay, the desire to merge human with machine is 'most obviously a dream of total rational control, a desire to render ourselves and the world fully transparent to technical scrutiny. It is for this reason also, as I've said, a desire for a unified explanation of consciousness and matter.'

   "What he's saying is that the digital offers a counterfeit version of what Christianity calls 'the sacramental': the God-given metaphysical unity of spirit and matter. This is the ultimate spiritual deception. ...

   "If Barba-Kay is right, then digital is the new Tower of Babel. In his book, the philosopher notes that digital technology is like a religion 'in the sense that it now bears the full weight of our yearning for integration, participation, and incorporation in a larger purpose than our own.' ...

   "The question, then, for everyone who lives in the digital world, is not, 'Will you serve God, or not?' but 'Which god will you serve?" This is so even for Christians and believers in other traditional religions. ...

   "Digital technology 'trains our view of what is most worth doing.' And it inescapably teaches us that 'the ultimate good for us is being empowered to choose, constrained by no one and nothing but the laws of nature. And in holding the exercise of choice to be the good, we are in turn recreating ourselves in various ways.' Digital tech teaches us to regard the Good as what is chosen, and what 'works,' in terms of satisfying our desires and adding to our sense of well-being. In the world made by digital tech, there is no authority for revealed religion, for philosophical creeds, or any transcendent truth. Digital culture is the technological manifestation of what Philip Rieff called 'the triumph of the therapeutic.'"

   For Dreher, "my own research has shown that attempting to gain total control of experience can only disenchant the world. ...

   "Barba-Kay does not write in a strictly religious vein, but he does acknowledge that 'our most vivid experiences of delight are encounters rather than choices, contact with the world in ways that are not merely up to us.' ...

   "The Christian tradition (and perhaps others) teaches that one must submit to God, and conform one's life to His will. This is hard. This is very hard. The New Testament likens it to death. But there is no other way. The martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer denounced any other way as 'cheap grace.' In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's villainous World Controller called the technological and material deliverance from suffering offered by his civilization as 'Christianity without tears.'"

   Digital technology holds that "suffering has meaning not because, as Christianity promises, accounts will be settled in the afterlife. No, suffering today is bearable because digital culture not only relieves much of it, but offers the promise that it can all ultimately be cured by technology. ...

   "I have no idea if the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay is a religious believer of any sort, but with the publication of A Web Of Our Own Making, he establishes himself as a major prophet." <www.tinyurl.com/yck8apfe> 

Please note: Somehow I (RP) failed to push the "Send" button for AR 28:33 - "Queering" Jesus: It's going mainstream. <www.bit.ly/3rntSx3> (All who love Him will be hurt by reading it.) So much is changing. So little has changed.

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