I wish I coiuld believe that you will hold to your promise, here.
I am interested in examining all the possibilities without having the thread interrupted by someone who claims that the quotes are true when he posts them but lies when the identical quotes when posted by someone else.
I think now would be a good time to clarify that. I’m reasonably sure you mean ‘claims that the quotes are true when he posts them but that the quotes are lies when posted by somebody else.’
I suppose you mean like the author of these statements (taken from this thread, alone)?
Oh, wait! Those were posted by you.
Doc, yes, thank you.
Can’t we all just get along? 
If “getting along” means one must silently endure the adverse influences of societally-reenforced mass delusions (as good a GUTotP as one can find), the andwer from myself is no, we most certainly can not.
Sheesh, I was only kiddin around and have no idea what you’re talking about. What makes you think your delusion is preferable anyone elses?
I figured the sadsmiley indicated some sort of sincerity. As recognize that error, and acknowledge it, I like to think that’s the important difference between being deluded and mistaken.
That may be. You refered to mass delusions, and effectively called a large group delusional. That’s a fairly presumptive call, which is why I made my comment.
Surely.
I used to believe in Christianity; I can’t buy into a myth that people insist be taken literally. But that doesn’t stop me from recognizing that the belief system is incredibly empowering and fulfills many of its promises.
Christ tells you to love your enemies; have no fear because the Father is guarding you. If you follow these principles, you end up having fewer enemies and troubles, and less fear leads to greater boldness and purpose in life.
In other words, Christians say that Christ will change you, and He will. That’s why the relgion has such staying power, that’s why it’s spreading like wildfire in around the world even as it dies off in poor jaded Europe (did you know that 1/5 of sub-Saharan Africans are now evangelical Christian?!).
Skeptics like to sneer at ol’ Xianity: It’s a bullshit myth, man! It ain’t “true”; ergo, it can only do you harm. Of course, they’re partially right: There are plenty of bad memes (sexual repression, etc.) built into the faith, and dropping one’s fear of the Father (who seems both loving and sinister to me) can be empowering as well. But if one is in pursuit of Truth, one will recognize the truth in the divers religions out there.
That’s an example of a thought-set that fulfills a good chunk of its promises. In contrast, let’s look at Marxism. However many good insights and observations Marx may have had, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (I don’t know if Marx said that, but it certainly was a big meme within Marism) is a belief in direct conflict with human nature; it ain’t never gonna work, and it will almost always cause a big mess.
In the case of NDEs, we have people come out of the experience changed, empowered, and utterly confident that eternity awaits them after death. Skeptics say, “They ain’t no eternity, man–BOOLshit!” But the NDEers have seen and experienced eternity, and now live without fear of the thing man is most afraid of but can do the very least about. If that isn’t empowerment, I don’t know what is.
I think a materialist or physicalist would say that there has to be probablistically meaningful method of producing them; they are, after all, physical phenomena like any other.
That probablity might be 100% with a certain method, or not. But if we look at the Lancet study, it seems that we can produce (or induce) NDEs at an 18% rate in a population by performing such and such a procedure (induced ventricular fibrillation in a pacemaker check, or something like that I think it was).
That counts as “production” to me, FWIW.
That’s innacurate.
The skeptics see “only” and my side sees “as much as.” Glass half full/empty.
I think what you are saying here is “folk scientific method” and not the real thing. Your concept of “produce” seems ad hoc, if not just hoc.
Yes, to that extent.
BTW, where did the expectation come about that NDEers be omnicient or at leat infallible? People in this “real,” physical world make mistakes of observation all the time.
That’s right, they have no reason to believe that there is only one path to the general category to which their experience belongs. But that is not being “fooled,” that is simply coming to a mistaken conclusion. There is a big semantic difference.
Schizophrenics provide an example of people who can have beliefs that are both false and extreme. The lack of subtlety (in many cases) makes for a good, clear example of delusion.
No doubt, but I think people who do not understand the illness or have not met and dealt with such people extensively tend to think of schizophrenics as “out of their gourd” loonies with no concept of truth and falsity. Whereas in fact most know very well that they have problems.
Just this morning I sat down in a coffee shot in Lebanon, and sitting there was a classic schizo guy. One of the first things he said to me was, “I have mental problems, I need to take medicine.”
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Whether a schizophrenic is empowered by their delusion or not depennds on the delusion. People who believe that they are the reborn Christ certainly feel empowered.
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Feeling empowered is different that actually being empowered. I will not deny your point, however, that a percentage of mentally ill people are empowered by their dysfunctions, but almost always they will have goals that are disharmonious with their environments or with society (pschopaths are empowered to wreak havoc, for example).
But contrast them with NDEers who attain greater harmony with themselves and with their environments.
Then you need a course in philosophy. The fact that 1 + 1 = 2 doesn’t have an explanation. In fact, it doesn’t have an explanation at all.
Yom Kippur.
I presume nothing. It’s a simple observation. UFO’s, Bigfoot, Nessie, plus some more mainstream falsehoods; all symptoms of a common lack of ability or desire to recognize the disproven as such, for reasons not entirely clear. Despite the lack of easily-discernable motive for all such delusional thinking, that belief in the falsified is pervasive, and widely encouraged in one manner or another, is, as I said, little more than an observation.
I’m afraid that I don’t see it. “Production” implies a specific act that results in a specific result. The study found 18% of its respondents reporting an apparent phenomenon. If the study were repeated, would they find 18%? 28% 8% 98% None? If the next study focused on drowning victims instead of MI victims, would the numbers change? If a later study focused on patients with DNR orders that were ignored for a multitude of traumas or conditions, would the numbers change?
With no deliberate act intended to produce a specific result, I do not see where we can make a claim that phenomenon has been “produced.”
The researchers did not induce myocardial infarction in the subjects, so I find it difficult to see how the word “produce” can be used in this context.
I suppose we will just have to disagree.
No disagreement.
I am merely verbally pointing toward something. We’ve continued to discover and model stuff, really new stuff (radio waves, quantum mechanics, neutrinos, quarks), and I have no reason to believe that we even close to being as knowledgeable, say, as we will be 10,000 years from now.
The Scientific Method that you (and I, for that matter) value is nothing but philosophy. 100% pure. It is a framework for aligning thought with Reality, which is what (according to my definition) philosophy or not. But my definition or no, it is philsophy by any standard; I am stating the obvious here, not making a controversial point.
The Method comprises a concept of truth and outlines the means by which to approach that truth. It comprises the concept of continuous refinement, which may be intuited but not demonstrated in an experiment (since the truth value of such an experiment must needs be judged by the very standard it sets out to prove).
Empiricism sits on the foundation of philosophy. Indeed, before we had “Science,” we had “Natural Philosophy.”
I don’t know what you mean by “odds against.” The extrapolations from mathematical models may or not be expected and/or ultra-obvious. If we model the acceleration of an object falling toward the earth in a vacuum, there are no “odds against” the calculations working at any given height.
I worked in applied science, experience that gives me useful insights in this type of argument.
I worked for a company that makes the dicing saws that cut silicon and gallium arsenide wafers into the chips that sit in your computer right now (among other related machines). The amout of theory behind how diamond grit cuts hard materials or silicon could literally fit in a small pamphlet, but the numbers of experiments that have been run to see whether a certain blade would cut or mangle a Pentium, etc., run into the hundreds of thousands.
The theory makes sense as far as it goes, but it is really a child’s understanding of the matter. Smaller diamond grit means less chipping. Bigger grit means faster processing and a lessened chance of blade breakage. Etc.
I worked in the lab and ran these experiments. The generalizations were useful, invaluable even, but you still had to run an experiment for each device. Theory alone could never tell you which grit size to use–you had to try them. And, controvening theory, sometimes a bigger grit size decreased chipping.
One other thing I learned–this is a big but hard-to-gain insight–is that really small things aren’t mind-bogglingly small. You can only see objects with an optical microscope as small as 2 microns, and a sheet of paper is about 80 microns. Brain cells are big–on average 8 microns (cite), and of the brain isn’t even nerve cells, which makes the reality of consciousness even more incredible. A few orders of magnitude and you are at the size of molecules.
But I digress. The way skeptics talk about SCIENCE sometimes makes me wonder whether they know anything about it at all. In some disciplines theory is very important and advanced, but in many others the theory is quite thin, it tells a reaonable story, but there is a lot of brute-force, trial-and-error data that supports highly advanced technologies but not an understanding of the underlying phenomena.
Indeed, skeptics quite a lot strike me as having a non-skeptical, highly dogmatic “folk understanding” of science, which hardly does their cause credit. For example, there is no Constitution of the Scientific Method writtern anywhere, and even this very post of mine implies a solid consensus on the Method that does not exist. It is a general set of principles held by a large number of people who may or may not agree as to either the details of the principles or their application in any given case.
OK, now address Freudian Psychology. It’s an interesting thing, is it not? How it infiltrated the pure Mind of Science.
And there were points in the Big Bang in which time and matter came into being.
I’m no Creationist, but the Big Bang most definitely qualifies as a myth. By “myth” I do not pejoratively mean “bullshit” but facts that are synthesized and presented with an appreciable story-telling component and by means of imagery that is not necessarily congruent with, and in some cases actually contradicts, the facts themselves. For example, the Bohr model of the atom (perhaps out of date, but it will serve as an example) has round blue electrons rotating about an accretion of red protons and white neutrons. Although the colors are explicitly arbitrary and meant to appeal to our sense of sight (but this is still a mythic trait), the image of distinct subatomic particles is not supported by any facts. And so on.
Skeptics like to deride the Judeo-Christian creation myth, yet there is much in the way of good facts conveyed by it. “Let There Be Light” is a pretty good summary of the “Big Bang,” and it is definitely true that light (starts) came before animals. A more incorrect myth would have animals floating in the void before planets arrived, or have planets arrive before the light.
But the biggest reason that the Big Bang is a myth is that we simply cannot be certain about its truth in the same way that we are certain about a golf ball rolling in the grass. We can’t observe it. We can’t record the event. We can only string the facts together and apply our imagination so as to understand it.
It’s not a hypothesis, but rather an observation. I can replicate a lead ball falling in a lab over and over, but I cannot easily (at all?) replicate the phenomenon of recurring dreams in a lab. The system of planets around the sun is very stable an observable. The system of ink molecules dispersing in water is very unstable and hard to observe.
Again, that’s just a long word for “the brain does it.” An organ that we barely understand.
Natch.
But let’s dig deeper. My take on NDEs is not that someone, when s/he nearly dies, is taken into a world of pure stability and total veridicity, as it were. Because NDEers are now in a construction that we would term “mental.” People communicate by telepathy. If you think if an object, it appears. And if that sounds like the dreamworld, then you’re right: it’s very much like it but with some important differences:
External intelligences you meet in dreams are self-created (usually but not always). Those you meet in the Afterlife are not self-created (usually not not always). And there can be matters of degree in this, too. That’s why I have no problem with certain levels of chaos in an NDE: some part of it is the NDEers projection and some part of it is not. My guess is that most of the projecting occurs pre-OBE and during the OBE portion (but before the tunnel).
The Afterlife world is far more stable than the dream world. You could pick up a book and read it, impossible in a dream. (This is a very important test of whether NDEs and OBEs are more than dreams, because it is known fact that you cannot read extensively and stably in a dream or in hypnosis. If you ask a person under hypnosis to pick up a book and read, they will give it a shot but soon give up [maybe some will wing it but not convince the audience]).
Time does not work as it does in a dream.
Cross-purposes! I’m saying, yes, they really believe it, but nevertheless the sounds seem to be in their heads (i.e., not echoing down the hall, not four feet away, etc.) I recognize that there may be exceptions.
Right, there is no such thing. Because, according to your system of thought, all “paranormal” items belong to the Empty Set (or, stated correctly, they are voided and one is referred to the Empty Set as to their status, as there can be ipso facto no “Set of Things That Don’t Exist”). Ergo “paranormal” is just connotation-dressing for voided items, a pejorative, as it were: “It doesn’t exist but sucks all the same.”
Do you see the philisohical problems behind a voided category with characteristics? Non-existent and red; non-existent, pan-fried, and buttery; non-existent and characterized by “woo-woo-ness”–?
Ultimately, as we New Agers keenly feel, the term “paranormal” serves as a highly illegal but beguilingly simple mental shortcut for those of the skeptical persuasion: If it seems like the kind of we don’t believe in, then it’s a priori false.
It may be crucial, but, sadly, I don’t think I’m quite following the argument. Let me see. Someone says they go to Alaska on an OBE and says they saw me living there. But that runs counter to Reality. I would say that they had an experience that conveyed false information. I don’t know if it was half-OBE and half-dream. All OBE but nevertheless containing a false image. Or something else altogether.
BTW, in my view “OBE” and “NDE” or even “hallucination” are not pointers at “things” in the same way that “dog” and “piano concerto” or “52” are. They are not things or completely defined entities but experiences, and using the same word for two different experiences doesn’t guarantee that we are are talking about the same thing. Maybe once we understand the experiences clearer and consciousness at a higher level we can be more clear and definite in our terminology.
The train is just an hallucination. 
What I said is a lot more complicated than the summary you provided here.
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You at least have a “basis of probabilities”, since you consider the identical twin case “extremely unlikely”.
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I don’t know if such a basis is equivalent to any kind of overarching philosophy. Even the most unreflective, unphilosophical people would, by their gut, say the twins thing is unlikely.
I don’t agree with vitalism, as we have discussed.
I think you have it backwards. NDEs are termed “veridical” not because the person says what they saw was real, but because they provide information that they could not have obtained without being conscious and observant when their brains weren’t functioning.
If they obtain such information–an impossibility under the atheist-materialist worldview–then it really doesn’t matter how much false information is mixed in with it. If there are 10 10-digit numbers on a paper in the operating room and the NDEer gets one of them completely right while providing sheer garbage for the rest, we know that his/her chances of guessing even the one number right are 1/1,000,000,000–or, in other words, pretty much impossible.
That is why I say that if, in our experiment of looking at numbers, the NDEers get a preponderance of the numbers wrong it will be a “big minus,” and do not say that the concept of an Afterlife will be proven bogus. To wit:
If they get them all wrong it would indicate that, at best, there is very little connection between what is going on their mind’s eye and what is going on the operating room. The images they remember are probably almost completely arbitrary. If, however, they are all able to maintain the discipline of looking for the numbers while their brains are going through hell, that fact would still be of great scientific interest.
If they get, as per the example above, a small but very statistically significant number correct, that would still be bad news. It would prove beyond a doubt that some type of Psi is real, but I would still have to conclude that the “Afterlife” in such a case is a chaos of genuine information transmission and false images–hardly something to be desired and perhaps not even stable for the long term (i.e., it could even imply a dissolution of the pattern, however “spiritual” it may be).
If they get a statistically significant but goodly percent correct, say 30 - 50% or so, that would be pretty good news. We could imagine that some people are good at seeing such things clearly, others are not, and perhaps there is a mixture of true seeing and imagining.
If they get a preponderance of the numbers correct, that is victory.
The article talked about other’s opinions of that correctness/falsity, but did not provide examples that we could judge for ourselves.
I read about your experiences. They were cool. I agree with your conclusion that the the Love, etc., is in your mind. That no “God” is necessary. Because your mind is part of That Which Is.
Those sound like very interesting experiments.
I don’t know why you are hung up on that word, but you were trying to use at a lever in an argument, so I object: You can’t “produce” it, therefore it’s not… I reject the reasoning there.
You can’t “produce” a definite result in a psych experiment, but still they run them. You can “produce” definite result in a quantum mechanics experiment, but the results come as probabilities that are definitely worth something as information.
The person controlling the condition of “production,” or lack thereof, is of little importance. We don’t “produce” volcanoes and earthquakes but we can still study them when Nature does “produce” them.
What is “producing” the disagreement?
I did not say that production was necessary for scientific study. However, you claimed that NDEs could be produced (implying a specific variety of scientific study such as that founds in labs). I deny that NDEs can (yet) be produced, so any examination of them is, at the moment, little more than interesting anecdote. If we could actually produce NDEs, we could control when they would and would not appear. With that sort of control, we could actually be able to examine them. Without that level of control, they remain outside the boundaries of serious examination. We can interview people to our hearts’ content, but without the ability to control when they will or will not occur, we are at the mercy of people (with their own agendas) claiming or denying NDE events with no way to determine who has spoken truly and who has invented (or denied) “experiences” that only they could know.
This puts any examiner at the disadvantage of never really knowing whether an interviewee is relating a true experience or simply having a good time spinning a tale (or who may be denying reality for fear of being labelled a kook).
I doubt those were the delusions you had in mind since you specificaly said
I doubt belief in Aliens, UFOs etc. have adverse influnces on society. I was commenting on a conversation about NDEs and thought you were too. Perhaps not.
I agree with you that there are beliefs that there is plenty of evidence against and do have a negative influence on society. Pulling a couple of verses out if a 2000 year old book, calling it the will of God, and useing it to discriminate against a group of people comes to mind. IMHO there are beliefs that are still in question. No conclusive evidence either way. In that regard I think people should be able to choose what they tend to believe without being called delusional.
Many thanks. I think I understand. Having come through Christianity to a much more independent place I see your point. There are many paths and I try to repsect them. I know people from many faiths and some from none who are simply trying to figure things out in their own way. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing that matters about beliefs are the choices and actions that spring from them and how those choices affect “we the people”
There seems to be a thing among Christians to overlook the flaws and spitefullness of anyone who professes to be Christian and to be a little more critical of anyone who is not a “believer” It’s disappointing. I suppose that’s a side effect of seeing it as “us” and “them”
** SentientMeat**
I followed the link and did some reading in the other thread that contained your testimony. Very interesting. My own journey has been along a variety of paths. As I left Christianity for a more independent approach I noticed among Christians the desire to keep the view of God as something out there apart from themselves. The Heavenly Father out there somewhere, with both heaven and father being apart from us. It’s through all the language they use and in the moments they become alarmed when someone uses language they’re not comfortable with.
I use the term God in discussions pretty freely but it’s almost beginning to seem like a metaphor to me. A term that refers to the love and truth I haven’t gotten to yet. In the spiritual experiences I’ve had it hasn’t felt like some outside force has entered me but rather I have accessed something that was always and is always there for me. A realization of potential and possibilities, so why wouldn’t we want to live there more and more rather than the occasional uplifting visit. It’s a feeling that’s it’s really up to me, and us, not some external being.
So…thanks for shareing. I appreciated it.