Scientific research takes notice of life and consciousness after death

Rich

The notion of distributed intelligence throughout the body is gaining notice among scientists. Ditto are the reports of experiences of people who survive medical death. Most interesting is the suggestion by the researcher that there is connectors activity after medical death and "how long it lingers, we can't say".

http://www.newsweek.com/where-do-you-go-when-you-die-increasing-signs-human-consciousness-after-death-800443?amp=1

"I’m saying we have a consciousness that makes up who we are—our selves, thoughts, feelings, emotions—and that entity, it seems, does not become annihilated just because we've crossed the threshold of death; it appears to keep functioning and not dissipate. How long it lingers, we can’t say.”

"Scientists working on human cadavers have from time to time observed genes that are active after death, according to University of Washington microbiology professor Peter Noble. For a 2017 study published in Open Biology, Noble and his colleagues tested mice and zebrafish and found not just a handful, but a combined total of 1,063 genes that remained active, in some cases for up to four days after the subject had died. Not only did their activity not dissipate—it spiked.

“We didn’t anticipate that,” Noble told Newsweek. “Can you imagine, 24 hours after [time of death] you take a sample and the transcripts of the genes are actually increasing in abundance? That was a surprise.”

Quite a few of these are developmental genes, Noble said, raising the fascinating and slightly disturbing possibility that in the period immediately following death, our bodies start reverting to the cellular conditions that were present when we were embryos. Noble found that certain animals' cells, post-mortem, remained viable for weeks. The research suggests a "step-wise shutdown," by which parts of us die gradually, at different rates, rather than all at once."

"Parnia's research has shown that people who survive medical death frequently report experiences that share similar themes: bright lights; benevolent guiding figures; relief from physical pain and a deeply felt sensation of peace. Because those experiences are subjective, it's possible to chalk them up to hallucinations. Where that explanation fails, though, is among the patients who have died on an operating table or crash cart and reported watching—from a corner of the room, from above—as doctors tried to save them, accounts subsequently verified by the (very perplexed) doctors themselves."

BC

Whether one thinks that consciousness survives death, or not, can't be proven until someone reports back after having been dead for a while (let's say... 30 days). I can be as certain that there is no survival of consciousness after death, as you may be that there is survival. We'll just have to disagree.

I don't think DNA activity after death tells us much either way. It's an interesting item. And, I would think, irrelevant. Because, if you think consciousness survives death, it isn't because of DNA. It would be because of the non-materiality of consciousness and mind, and DNA is material stuff.

I don't know what happens after death. I hope that when we die that's it, FINIS, but... I can't and don't know. And neither can you, or anybody else, of course.

Rich

I can be as certain that there is no survival of consciousness after death, as you may be that there is survival. We'll just have to disagree. — Bitter Crank

Did you even read the title?

The purpose of the post was not to relate my my own ideas on the subject. The purpose was to reportb in the researcher's comments, Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at New York University Langone Medical Center:

"I’m saying we have a consciousness that makes up who we are—our selves, thoughts, feelings, emotions—and that entity, it seems, does not become annihilated just because we've crossed the threshold of death; it appears to keep functioning and not dissipate.How long it is, we can’t say."

SophistiCat

The research in question has nothing to do with consciousness. "Life after death" is a journalistic flourish. This is the article in Open Biology:

Tracing the dynamics of gene transcripts after organismal death

The Newsweek article, as quoted in the OP, fairly summarizes the research. What the researchers found is that "a step-wise shutdown occurs in organismal death that is manifested by the apparent increase of certain transcripts with various abundance maxima and durations." Here is their own take on their findings:

What do the increases in postmortem transcript abundances mean in the context of life?

Since increases in postmortem transcript abundances occurred in both the zebrafish and the mouse in our study, it is reasonable to suggest that other multicellular eukaryotes will display a similar phenomenon. What does this phenomenon mean in the context of organismal life? We conjecture that the highly ordered structure of an organism—evolved and refined through natural selection and self-organizing processes [215]—undergoes a thermodynamically driven process of spontaneous disintegration through complex pathways, which apparently involve the increased abundance of specific gene transcripts and putative feedback loops. While evolution played a role in pre-patterning of these pathways, it probably does not play any role in its disintegration fate. However, one could argue that some of these pathways have evolved to favour healing or ‘resuscitation’ after severe injury, which would be a possible adaptive advantage. The increased abundance of inflammation response transcripts, for example, putatively indicates that a signal of infection or injury is sensed by the still alive cells after death of the body. Alternatively, these increases could be due to fast decay of some repressors of genes or whole pathways leading to the transcription of genes. Hence, it will be of interest to study this in more detail, since this could, for example, provide insights into how to better preserve organs retrieved for transplantation. — Pozhitkov et al.

Sam Parnia was not involved in the research. He is known for running the AWARE near-death experiences study and for advocating highly speculative ideas about consciousness.

BC

Did you even read the title?

The purpose of the post was not to relate my my own ideas on the subject. — Rich

I did read the title. Yes, I understood that you were passing along information you had read. The "you" in my response was less "Rich" and more "anybody who thought a piece of evidence of post-mortem consciousness had arrived".

At the time I wrote my response I had not read the article; it was my snobbish assumption that nothing very significant would be published in Newsweek first. I have since read it.

So what do you, "Rich" think about this? Evidence of consciousness surviving death or not?

Rich

↪Bitter Crank

I always look for "clues" from many perspectives.

The first big one for me was the nature of inborn skills, which sometimes are enormously magnified in children with very special abilities (e.g. prodigies), but also evident in people with very special capabilities such as idiot savants. The standard scientific "explanation" is that well, it is a very complicated mix of neurons that trigger of all kinds of chemical reaction that in turn, presto, magic, becomes a special skill.

My alternate explanation would be that skills are memory and memory is actually embedded in the holographic universe as wave patterns, and retrieved by transmission/reception waves of the correct frequency from the brain. This conforms to the latest research regarding the quantum holographic universe.

Other evidence or clues pops up now and then such as NDE and the latest observations by medical teams in hospitals such as described in the article. From personal experience I know that conscious is distributed throughout the body (forget about this brain fixation by since), so there has to be some model of memory and perception that accounts for this. Stephen Robbins provides brilliant insights into this question in his Youtube videos which are based upon Bergson's metaphysics.

BC

↪Rich

Thanks for your response.

My alternate explanation would be that skills are memory and memory is actually embedded in the holographic universe as wave patterns, and retrieved by transmission/reception waves of the correct frequency from the brain. This conforms to the latest research regarding the quantum holographic universe. — Rich

I don't understand what a holographic universe is, or what these waves of the correct frequency are. I am afraid that an explanation will be as over my head as the holographic universe is. I'm not knocking the idea -- I just have no idea what it means.

Rich

I don't understand what a holographic universe is, or what these waves of the correct frequency are. I am afraid that an explanation will be as over my head as the holographic universe is. I'm not knocking the idea -- I just have no idea what it means. — Bitter Crank

Do you understand how holograms are constructed and reconstructed?

Streetlight

↪SophistiCat

(Y)

SophistiCat

This is one of those papers where the results are probably more interesting and surprising to the researchers in the field than to laymen - which is probably why Newsweek had to go to Sam Parnia to spice up the story. That in a multicellular organism with many differentiated tissues and organs "death" does not instantaneously halt all biological processes does not sound at all surprising. How could postmortem organ transplantation could be possible if all organs began decaying at the instance of death? And the fact that some gene expression continues for a while after death should not be surprising either: after all, we've always known that hair and nails continue to grow after death, and that requires gene expression (as we later realized). I am surprised that the authors don't acknowledge this, and instead write in the introduction:

While much is known about gene expression circuits in life, there is a paucity of information about what happens to these circuits after organismal death. For example, it is not well known whether gene expression diminishes gradually or abruptly stops in death—nor whether specific gene transcripts increase in abundance in death. — Pozhitkov et al.

I suppose that the most interesting result here is that some gene transcription does indeed rev up for a short time after death.

Rich

Sam Parnia was not involved in the research. He is known for running the AWARE near-death experiences study and for advocating highly speculative ideas about consciousness. — SophistiCat

Good for him. Always nice to hear of a scientist talking about consciousness rather than using placeholders like "gene transcription" or do genes have a mind if their own? The kind that continues to reproduce whether or not the body is still alive? Is this the "selfish gene" I hear so much about?

Scientific research takes notice of life and consciousness after death

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