Why Do People Get Better Right Before They Die?

Really interesting news story just came out. Flashes of lucidity. This is from El Paii. It's a science article. Flashes of lucidity before death, the debate shaking up neuroscience, near-death experiences, and terminal lucidity raise questions about what we know about consciousness. And it opens up with one of these stories that, you know, many of us have experienced, which is you have a loved one who, well, I'll just read the testimony. My mother had advanced Alzheimer's. She no longer recognized us and seemed indifferent to the strangers who visited her once or twice a week. The day before she died, however, everything changed. Not only did she recognize us, but she wanted to know what had happened to each of us in the past year. This happens, where dementia patients, Alzheimer's patients, who are really out of it, who might not even be able to speak, right at the end, they kind of snap back in. Totally. Oh, Nancy Reagan talked about this. Nancy Reagan said that at the very end, Ronald Reagan had been out of it for years. And then finally, in moments before he died, he just opened his eyes, looked right at her. He was totally back on, totally plugged in. What explains that? I love this science article because often, and increasingly actually, scientific studies prove that scientism is nonsense and prove more classical and indeed Christian philosophical and anthropological assumptions. For one, that we're not just matter, that we're not just stuff. There is a modern presumption, a false one, in my humble opinion. Our identity, our consciousness, our soul, if you want to call it that, is really just our brain. That our mind and our brain are synonymous and that what we refer to as the mind or the intellect or even the soul is just synapses firing off in matter. That is not possible. The classical Christian tradition and the scholastic tradition and people like the St. Thomas Aquinas, not a day goes by on the show I don't mention something from St. Thomas Aquinas. These guys demonstrate that quite easily. The way St. Thomas does in Summa Contra Gentiles or the Summa Theologiae is to point out that the intellect or the mind receives certain forms. Forms using the language of Plato and Aristotle. To bring it down to earth, the eye receives colors. That's the kind of stuff, substances that the eye receives. So the eye doesn't receive smells. You don't smell through your eye. The eye doesn't receive texture. You don't feel through your eye. You see through your eye. Colors. That's what the eye deals with. What does the intellect deal with? The intellect doesn't just deal with material stuff. Your hands deal with material stuff. I'm feeling the microphone. I'm feeling the leftist years tumbler. I'm smelling the delicious Mayflower cigars of my nose. The nose. But the mind, the intellect doesn't just deal with material stuff. The intellect deals with abstract things. Immaterial substances. Notions of justice, of equality, mathematics, things that are abstract. Therefore, the intellect cannot merely be matter, cannot merely be a body. Because the body cannot receive things that are in deal in things that are so beyond it, that are immaterial. That's it. That's what Thomas Aquinas would say. That's what the classical philosophical and Christian tradition holds. Modern people say, no, that's all just dumb. The soul is fake. It's imaginary. We're all just matter. You know, Karl Marx is a materialist. A lot of modern philosophy is materialism. Well, science is saying no. Because let's just say that the modern people are right and the brain is just matter. It's just stuff. Well, and the mind is just stuff. Alzheimer's disease is plaque on the brain. Alzheimer's disease is irreversible. There's no cure for it and you just get plaque on your brain and your brain stops working and that's why your memory fails and that's why you you lose your ability to communicate and you know, you become kind of a vegetable. If that is all that your intellect, I'm not saying the intellect doesn't relate to the brain. That certainly does. I'm not saying that the mind doesn't relate to the body. I'm certainly not saying the soul doesn't relate to the body. But if that's all that it is, terminal lucidity makes absolutely no sense. But if your intellect is something different, then terminal lucidity makes sense. Near-death experiences make sense where people can, as they are clinically dead, can see their bodies, can describe the operating room that they were ostensibly dead in. You know, they wouldn't have seen with their own eyes. There is, to quote Hamlet, since we're quoting old people, there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our modern philosophy ratio. No question about that. I am glad that you enjoyed that clip. Now stop, ring the bell, subscribe. We'll see you next time.