Talk:Life review

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 August 2020 and 24 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hmujo.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:34, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

NPOV

G'day. I just put a NPOV tag on the page. It is written from a very obvious POV believing that it is some sort of real event. There are numerous examples such as:

"While some scientists discount NDEs themselves or stigmatize their study, the large body of both NDE and LR accounts, when set under scrutiny, tends to defy dismissal as hallucination or cerebral effect..."

This is pure NPOV bull. Infact, having a large amount of the LRs points towards it being a common result of the brain dying or whatever the circumstances of the situation is, that is beside the point though. Needs a lot of work, and I know it is rude to expect someone else to do it, but I'm busy :P. Cheers. Rothery 02:07, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

G'day, I just removed it. Perhaps we could review the concept of POV before you impose your own dogmatic "pure bull" on a subject you come to completely green and unread on. You glibly glided over the careful NPOV wording "tends to defy", which is based on the evidence itself rather than preconception. You also skilfully excised the critical rest of the sentence, "...by virtue of its unusual detail, volume, consistency, verisimilitude, narrators' credibility, and its insistent recounting of vividness and panoramicity." The unsustainable word "obvious" to describe a well-supported and still neutral wording betrays where the real POV lies.

Until you've read a good twenty or so related volumes and scientists' sites (including many hundreds of detailed individual accounts) and acquired anything distantly resembling a familiarity with the actual subject, in addition to the hefty refutations of the thoroughly debunked and untenable pseudoskeptic "brain dying or whatever" theories, perhaps you could confine your uninformed dogmatizing to instructing everybody on the religion pages, founded on much less volume of empirical data and study than this, to how silly they are to fill wiki with such from your POV, "bull" rather than this one. Chris Rodgers 00:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

G'day again. I was just going over my old talk page comments and found this page which I had forgotten about. Anyway...

Whether I have read 20 (or 200) volumes about the subject is completely irrelevant to being able to recognise the very obvious POV that the article was written from, as it permeates the entire article. Since you apparently don't realise this, I'll give you some more specific examples.

While some scientists discount NDEs themselves or stigmatize their study, the large body of both NDE and LR accounts, when set under scrutiny, tends to defy dismissal as hallucination or cerebral effect, by virtue of its unusual detail, volume, consistency, verisimilitude, narrators' credibility, and its insistent recounting of vividness and panoramicity. The NDE and its derivative phenomena as a result tend to lie more in the realm of the paranormal and parapsychology, though that does not argue against their scientific study or reality per se.

First of all, aside from the fact that the entire paragraph implies that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of paranormal activity in relation to LRs without any sort of citation or reference at all, the word "stigmatize" is used. How you can possibly believe it is appropriate to use such a loaded term is beyond me. Then there is the phrase 'tends to defy', which are clearly weasel words used to try and make the sentence more impartial; you are referring in general to a large body of accounts so they either do or they don't. Then the end of the paragraph is pure opinion, stating that just because something lies in the realm of the paranormal or parapsychology does not mean it is not open to having any scientific reality. Not sourced and not true, in fact it cannot be true since it is an opinion. You could rewrite it and say that "the majority of scientists believe that LRs can be studied..." or whatever you would like, and accompany it with a reference.

The rest of the article is absent of any blatant POV claims, but focuses entirely on the experience and the effect of LRs which is fine and dandy, but aside from the comment about the awful stigmatizing minority of scientists, there is literally nothing else in the article that suggests any possible alternatives to what is claimed in the lead. Some other misc stuff: the article starts off stating that LRs are "widely reported in near-death experiences"; widely has pretty much no meaning at all in this context. How widely? There is no hint at it being eight, 18 or 80 percent, and of course no source. Speaking of which, of the external links, two of them go to the same site (the "Description of the LR in a medical discussion of the NDE" appears to redirect to the main iands.org site), which itself is not a reliable source. I realise it isn't listed as a reference but just wanted to make sure you don't think it actually counts as any sort of citation for the article (as you appear pretty ignorant of other Wikipedia rules and policies). The third link could well be used as a reference source.

You say on your user page that you have a "conviction in dialog and the NPOV". I am sure you are being genuine when you write this and mean no harm, but you really have to be sure to try as hard as possible to look at the article through a neutral viewpoint, and I realise this could be difficult. I would probably find it hard to write a balanced article on Fox News's editorial practices. Ironically (or coincidentally?) I believe that this article actually uses some of the same underhanded journalistic tactics that Fox News does. I am personally in my last year of journalism at uni in Australia and have a deep interest in how language can create bias, intentionally or unintentionally. However, I don't think I am being too pedantic in my criticisms; the entire article is written with an obvious acceptance of LR as fact. Whatever you or I believe about it is completely irrelevant. It should be written only with factual information in clear language. Hope that clears up what I was saying about the article being POV, lol. Cheers, Rothery 12:50, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

The frequency of an experience says nothing about whether it is hallucinatory or not. We all hallucinate nightly during REM sleep and no reasonable scientist assumes that dreams are anything other than hallucinations. Proxima Centauri (talk) 09:13, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

I've edited the article. Proxima Centauri (talk) 09:24, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

This is a Scientific Subject Not a Spiritual One

We know from the history of this entry that it was "parked" on for a long time by a strongly religious person, who aggressively attacked anyone who tried to change the content. I am happy to see that the entry now has a more secular, scientific basis. What surprised me about the behavior was that it was going on here even though this is not a "Afterlife experience" or even a "Near death experience" (both rely on the loss of consciousness), this is an actual (still conscious) phenomenon that appears to happen to human beings sometimes when they are in extreme danger. A reasonable evolutionary explanation is that the brain is quickly reviewing all of it's "contents" at once for vital information to help it get out of the situation. It is a perfectly acceptable explanation that it is likely that the brain would need to go into a mode where it has to make decisions based on a few seconds or a fraction of a second, in which case there is only one last possible conscious act for the human being to make before they will die (or survive.) People in dire peril like war or melee combat or muggings feel "more alive" and their thinking has "greater clarity" in those moments. It is very likely the brain is simply doing what it needs to do, based on how it evolved... the mammals that had brains which went into this temporary mode of operations were more likely to survive in situations of dire peril than those that did not.

Removing religious explanations from this entry is NOT an attack on religion and is not POV, regardless of anyone's personal opinions about religion (mine included) .. I implore people to please understand this. Religious people who wish to write about the review of life after death should simply edit the appropriate entry about Christian (and other religious and spiritual) proclamations, suspicions and assumptions about life after death such as the entry about Saint Peter or the Pearly gates, and so on. I really do hope people can come to a reasonable resolution and no longer fight over the content of this specific Wikipedia entry. This entry is about a physical phenomenon and should be handled the exact same way as Déjà vu.

It is inappropriate to claim that the article is POV if a scientific explanation is given and not a spiritual/religious one. This is an entry about an experience that is related to the conscious mind, and does not deal with "the afterlife". The entry being scientific does not constitute an attack on religion or spirituality.--Radical Mallard (talk) 13:53, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Something being a possible and reasonable sounding explanation has never made it scientific fact. The explanation is not 'perfectly acceptable' therefore. (And actually doesn't seem very plausible to me.) I came to this article expecting to find out whether this phenomenon really occurs, and exactly what is experienced. I'd have expected sub-sections, including perhaps ones on different approaches to understanding this phenomenon. This is a thing that is part of human life, that can be talked about in the terms we've always employed quite naturally and without any unnecesary controversy. It's not only neo-atheists, or indeed anti-scientific Christians, who want to make use of Wikipedia. Meerta (talk) 02:16, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

But this isn't about religion or atheism. This is about whether there is a scientific explanation for life review/"life flashing before your eyes" or not, and whether that should form the bulk of this Wikipedia article, as opposed to non-scientific and non-evolutionary/non-biological explanations. Issues like this are completely independent of the issue of religion one way or the other. A subject having a scientific explanation has no bearing on a belief in a religion or not (but does affect the focus of Wikipedia itself). For example, Christian Televangelist Pat Robertson has supported Evolution: YouTube: Even Pat Robertson Denies the Earth is 6,000 Years Old ---Radical Mallard (talk) 15:34, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

This doesn't seem respond to my point. Meerta

removing POV template without ongoing discussion per Template:POV instructions

I've removed an old neutrality tag from this page that appears to have no active discussion per the instructions at Template:POV:

This template is not meant to be a permanent resident on any article. Remove this template whenever:

1. There is consensus on the talkpage or the NPOV Noticeboard that the issue has been resolved
2. It is not clear what the neutrality issue is, and no satisfactory explanation has been given
3. In the absence of any discussion, or if the discussion has become dormant.

Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 18:37, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

"Life review"

Does anyone have any sources that acknowledge the term "Life review" in reference to this phenomenon? I think a more common name would be Life flashing before one's eyes. TarkusAB^talk/contrib 00:10, 8 August 2023 (UTC)