Thanks again.
I have presented this link a dozen times. The skeptics never seem to be able to find, read, or understand any of it. I think it is just a denial strategy.
It is not capricious in nature, only not understood properly, some people remember years later, some know something happened but can’t tell what. The fact they don’t all experience doesn’t take away from those that do in any manner. Yes, the phenomenon is real, the research shows what it is, you don’t need to give meaning, it already has meaning.
I appreciated your post. I’m not sure what you mean by a set of beliefs completely unfullfilled, or fullfilled on their own terms. Can you elaborate?
No matter how poor a poster your opponent is, if you are going to “fight ignorance” and set a good example to others as to posting practices, you’ll have to hold yourself to a higher standard.
Especially since you’re a mod, right?
Only 18% reported it, and even less reported a deep NDE, still capricious. The phenomenon indeed fits the more prosaic explanations, no need for mumbo jumbo.
I have held to a higher standard. I have rationally disputed lekatt’s lies on numerous occasions. I have no burden to do his work for him. If you choose to jump in, that is your prerogative, but unless you can point out where I have behaved dishonestly, you are simply trying to pick a fight that I really see no point in pursuing.
I don’t think that it is so much a lie as it is a misconception held by both lekatt and the many posters who scoff at the idea that science is interested in being open to possibilities.
I don’t believe that anything is “paranormal.” Either it is natural or it doesn’t exist. There are plenty of natural things that haven’t been explained by science yet. Maybe some things simply just don’t exist after all. Maybe others aren’t yet verifiable.
But if scientists are exploring the possibility of Dark Matter and String Theory, I would think they may have learned something about preconceived notions.
You’ve nailed it!
Here is an example of lekatt’s dishonesty: he has mentioned the article from The Lancet just over a dozen times (often misstating or overstating the conclusions drawn in it), but he has never posted a link to it and he has never identified the article by name. For someone who is so familiar with the article (although there is circumstantial evidence that he has actually only read outtakes printed on other web sites or Reader’s Digest and never read the article), it is typical of his methods of argumentation that he has never provided the actual citation even though he pretends that he has done so.
What exactly do you think this study proves?
I already told you what I think you did wrong. You badgered lekatt for a cite in such way that someone new to the debate might suspect that no Lancet study ever existed. The “common ground” whereof I spoke is an understanding to whatever bare facts we can agree upon, including the existence of journal articles. To fiddle around with such matters is just to obfuscate the debate and generally obstruct the “fight against ignorance.”
There’s no “fight picking”–I called you on something specific. Agree or disagree, as you wish.
You may very well be right. We dealt with this topic in a recent Pit thread. Lekatt has shown that he wants to participate in every thread about this topic. Either the opposing side conforms to his level of posting in the debate, which you condemn, or you “sponsor” a higher-level debate in which ignorance is fought and all that. Those seem like the two main choices to me.
Putting my money where my mouth is, I’ve engaged this topic on a different, philosophical level and am willing to debate it there if people are interested in a fair and gentle[wo]manly fashion. Debate if you feel so inclined.
Then you are simply wrong. I asked lekatt to support a claim. Given his propensity for false statements, it was the most ethical request I could make. (Note that he not only failed to support his claim, he has now lied about having done so repeatedly in the past. That is the point of challenging a poster who has a proven record of dishonesty, regardless the minor point on which the discussion turns.)
Let’s accept all this. I have generally found you to be quite fair and reaonable as a poster and a mod, so I have no reason to doubt you.
The fact still remains that any debate here about the “paranormal” turns into a bitter battle between lekatt and everyone else. My point still stands that, if we are to fight ignorance and have a fruitful discussion, then the “lekatt is at fault” point, however true, must be transcended.
Keep saying that and eventually it’ll be true.
I think the example I posted was pretty good. If something impacts me, why does it then follow that it has to be real? Is Van Gogh’s Wheat field with crows real, evidenced by the fact that I found it very powerful? Give me a reason to agree that the ‘profound impact’ indicates that they’re real.
Yeah, well, see my post. What does “real” mean? That’s a big semantic, espitemological, and ontological question that you can’t just blow off.
The picture is real: it’s a painting stuck on a wall, reproduced in many a book, no doubt viewable on the Net. It’s even an interpretation of a “real” wheat field in the 1890s, isn’t it? In what ways is it “real” and “not real”?
It’s not really real until it has been loved so much that the fur has been rubbed off.
I’m not questioning the existence of the painting, nor of the existence of strips of celluloid and actors. Of course actors have to play out a scene for it to be filmed, just as an artist is probably going to sketch and visualize a scene. When you watch a movie, you generally agree to pretend that what your watching is a product of reality as you experience it instead of the work of a catered, artistically lit production based on a script and featuring extremely rich, handsome people who are being paid tons of money to pretend they’re not being paid tons of money to do whatever they’re doing on the screen.
I was addressing, by analogy, the comments of the doctor. That’s the focus.
I think so. But I don’t know (and it may be unknowable, as I don’t think his letters reveal it one way or the other) if Van Gogh ever saw a scene like the one he depicts in the painting. I think it’s equally possible that he did and that he did not.
I liked my movie example better, but here is what I was saying: the fact that somebody was touched by a movie or painting is not evidence that it the things depicted as they are purported to have happened (in the movie or painting). They may have, but the issue I’m addressing is not about the nature of reality as much as it is about what we accept as evidence. The man’s opinion is not backed up by the part of his remark intended as support.
Thank Og for serious debate, eh?
That’s rather a mangled application of GIT, if I may say, and in any case I don’t really recognise that descritpion of “Reality” as being mine, at least. The axiom which most reasonable people agree on is that where an ordinary or natural explanation suffices, extraordinary or supernatural explanations are unnecessary. There is simply no evidence of the required calibre which makes these latter explanations necessary. It is very strange that no such phenomenon can be replicated by careful planning, to the extent that the most reasonable conclusion is that they are just not there to be found.
Why not? What evidence of the required calibre sidesteps such an explanation?
No, I will ask, implore, beg and beseech you to produce evidence of the required calibre, since I would be as impressed as any to find a verifiable way of seeing the afterlife. Heck, I’d jump in a frozen lake or recreate the film Flatliners myself if I thought I’d demonstrably see the objects deliberately left on top of the wardrobe to test whether NDE’s are veridical.
Well, I guess you’d better step to it investigating all the other things which scientific tests have falsified, if failure to find any compelling reason to shift the paradigm is just the start of the project.
Only if we want to equate the word “Afterlife” with “powerful dream”. In which case, I’ve seen the Afterlife often, notably when I’ve taken acid.
“Real” is just a word. The actual facts of each case, which you seem unwilling to discuss, is true enquiry.
I don’t agree that most reasonable people agree. I also wouldn’t know what an “extraordinary” or “supernatural” explanation is, as opposed to any other type. That sounds like a matter of sheer arbitrary opinion. Personal taste, if you will.
NDEs, obviously, can be produced with with great regularity. No one says they “can’t be found.” It’s their nature that is at issue.
Alien abduction phenomena, too, are reported with such regularity that, despite the fact they can’t be reproduced in the lab (I don’t know if sleep paralysis can either), no one says that the phenomena themselves don’t exist. Again, it’s their nature that is at issue.
I don’t get your point here. You might very well have an NDE at some point in your life, and, like nearly 100% (I have seen cites for only one or two counterexamples, in that Hallucinatory NDE link) of those who experienced them (believers and atheists alike) you might come back and say, “It was real, it was more than a dream.” And in that case I suppose your worldview will change via that personal experience.
People aren’t (apparently) convinced because of the fact that their NDEs are proved veridical, but by the experience itself.
That’s not a response to what I wrote. I’m saying that if scientists determine that phenomena “exist” but “are not real,” as with NDEs, then that “not real” assessment does not by any means allow us to dismiss the phenomenon as unimportant or lacking meaning.
Straw man. Even Susan Blackmore, who says that NDEs are not evidence for the Afterlife, recognizes that their nature is vastly different than that of ordinary dreams.
Ah, but “actual facts” is just a phrase. We’re back to epistemology, ontology, semantics. Can’t dodge it, can’t escape it.