You could take an infinite number of twigs, bind them together with unbreakable twine, and they still wouldn’t be a tree.
-Czarcasm’s Addendum to lekatt’s Non-Sequitur
What twigs of ignorance and meaningless superstition? When we started they were just twigs, changing the rules again?
Definately an accurate observation.
- You “definately” have no idea what “non-sequitur” means, do you?
- If you are going to volunteer to do the irony, I could use a little extra starch in the collars, please.
I do appreciate an open mind and will quickly reply. I am a spiritual person, I feel emotions and intent of others. Sort of like a lie-detector, I know in only a few sentences or posts if someone is being honest with me. I won’t claim to be 100%, however. It is not an unusual trait, many sense the intent others, and children and animals sense it even better than us adults.
Let’s just say I don’t speak Latino very often.
OK, so I had more time than I thought today. Really, some day I need to get a job where I have actual work to do.
Anyway, I read your cite, the whole thing. I hope you will read my full response with an open mind, as I did for your source. Here are my responses. (For those of you just joining us, NDE=Near Death Experience and OBE=Out of Body Experience. NDEr is one who experiences an NDE.) All quotes are from lekatt’s source.
I do not dispute that they are “real”. I accept that people experience NDEs. However, I dispute that they are anything other than the result of chemical and biological processes that occur in the brain under certain conditions. I submit that, while the triggers are poorly understood at present, this lack of understanding should not give a reasonable person cause to accept that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife or other supernatural phenomena.
I believe these claims are in dispute. Untangling whether the memories of NDErs accurately represent what was happening at the time of the NDE is tricky. Researchers like Dr. Jan Holden and Dr. Bruce Greyson have been doing things like placing a laptop facing upward near the ceiling of the OR, and interviewing patients later to see if they could recall what images were displayed on the laptop. To my knowledge, they have not yet captured an NDE in progress, so to speak. Apparently, other researchers have been trying to corroborate NDErs recollections with the recollections of the doctors and nurses. I have not been able to locate the results of these kinds of studies. Something in a peer-reviewed medical journal would be a great source, but I don’t have access to these kinds of resources at the moment. Suffice it to say that the veracity of these claims is not universally accepted. At least some of the recollections reported as very accurate have turned out, upon further investigation, to be either very vague or just wrong.
These are intriguing stories, but really anecdotal. “Information that they could not have otherwise known” is quite vague. Perhaps the NDEr awakens and says something like, “I saw Grandpa. He wore a green shirt and walked with a cane.” The family member hearing this thinks, “Wow, my dad did own a green shirt and walk with a cane. Amazing.” But these are such common and obvious traits that they could be applied to lots of men. Is this what the writer considers a “hit”? Or are we talking about things like “I saw Granddad. He was six feet tall, had green eyes and a Clark Gable-style mustache, walked with a slight limp, and had a tattoo of a snake on his left arm.” We just can’t tell from this kind of account. There is no real data here, just vague anecdotes.
Again, do we have an actual account of something like this? Do we have something better than “I heard about his guy once who…” Also, how does a blind person describe visual experiences? If someone blind from birth says, “I saw a doctor in green scrubs leaning over me,” what does that mean? Is the patient’s understanding of “green” the same as mine? How does he recognize “green”? Has the patient just heard and read the word “green” associated with scrubs so often that it became ingrained in his subconscious? If he reports “green scrubs” to his family, do they even know that the doctor was wearing green scrubs? They weren’t in the OR either. Who is verifying the patient’s claims of what he saw?
What is “knowledge far beyond their personal capacity”? Did the NDEr report something specific, like “Grandpa hid 75 pearls in a red coffee can under the stairs”, or did he just report some vague impression that his family interpreted as a “hit”? I don’t know. The claims of this site are insufficient to address these questions.
These studies, while intriguing, are disputed. There are questions about the methods by which Sabom and others gathered their data, how well it was verified, and what was considered a “hit”. Skeptics (see Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences » Internet Infidels and Near-Death Experiences - Dr Susan Blackmore) charge that many OBE recollections can be accounted for by a mix of prior knowledge, cultural expectations, and generous interpretation on the part of the interviewer. This is not to say that such objections can be used to dismiss all NDE/OBE reports. However, it is enough to say that these studies are far from conclusive. Time has a recent article (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1657919,00.html) that gives an overview of the research being done by a lot of people smarter than me. There is a lot of debate about what these things mean. Some aspects of the classic NDE seem to be pretty clearly related to certain physical stimuli; some don’t. I certainly don’t know what it all means. But your reference cherry-picks the researchers who favor a spiritual basis for NDEs without acknowledging the ongoing debate in medical and scientific circles. That’s misleading.
People change their minds in response to stressful and unexplained events all the time. That tells us something about the effect of the event, but tells us nothing about the source of the event. You cannot look at outcomes and say, “the effect is X, therefore the cause must be Y.” NDEs are undoubtedly powerful events, which many people interpret as spiritual in nature. That does not, however, tell us anything about the nature or cause of those events. You cannot infer purpose from effect. Many people say they experience God while under the influence of drugs; that does not mean that God gave us drugs for that purpose.
Fair enough. But “We don’t really understand this” does not lead us to “It is supernatural.” Our ignorance is not evidence of anything. The argument “scientists don’t understand it, therefore it is spiritual” is not persuasive.
OK, let’s.
The answer to this argument is really just a rehash of previous arguments. I do think, however, that scientists would agree that anoxia is only part of what’s going on with NDEs.
The last part of this statement takes it as proven that the brain cannot produce and remember images in this state. I don’t think this is proven. Perhaps EEGs are not able to detect all brain activity. Perhaps the NDErs are filling in some memories after that fact. Who knows? Again, these guys are cherry-picking science they agree with, presenting it as established fact, and dismissing the science that questions them.
More of the same.
I’m not finding much on this test. I am skeptical of the argument that g-force stress puts people in a state of “simulated clinical death”.
I guess I’ll just Google “Vicki” for more information on this case. Even if Blackmore is wrong about the optical nerve thing, the reasonable response is “we don’t really know what’s going on here”, not “it must be the afterlife”.
Lots of anecdotes here. Completely unhelpful.
Yeah, we wouldn’t want that.
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.
Look, I don’t know what’s up with NDEs and OBEs. My unscientific guess is that a combination of things like loss of oxygen, endorphins, other brain chemicals, false memories, cultural expectations, and generous interpretation by family members can account for the majority of NDE cases. Do I know for sure? Of course not. Does that mean that the answer is therefore spiritual? No.
When scientists first started hammering out the germ theory of disease, I imagine lots of people seized on inconsistencies in their findings and proclaimed, “See? Science can’t answer our questions. Diseases must be the work of spirits.” When scientists started unraveling the workings of the brain, holdouts still claimed that the mentally ill were possessed by demons, until science pulled back the curtains. The same thing is happening with NDEs. “Scientists don’t know! It can only be the work of God!” And when scientists sort this out, what then? Where will we go looking for God? Maybe there are spirits and gods. But they won’t be found hiding in the gaps of our scientific knowledge.
I had hoped you would read it, you give back the same old skeptical arguments that were defeated by research. You also pose a lot of “what if” anyone can what if anything to death.
Guess I was wrong.
Some quotes from the research:
Of course skeptical literature writers do not find anything because they don’t read and comprehend the material either.
What you are sensing is your own feelings. It has nothing to do with what is actually going on. We all make judgements about others but us non-goofy people recognize it for what it is. I just flipped a coin and it came up tails. Am I lying or not. You have a fifty fifty chance of GUESSING correctly.
I was trying to be nice, but now you’re just pissing me off.
A question to the folks who have been here longer than me: I’m just wasting my time in this thread, aren’t I? Is this some kind of SDMB initiation that was held in reserve just for me?
“Definately”. The only sane thing to do is have fun while it lasts. As for logic, lekatt’s immune to it.
The object of the game is to post frequently without getting a “Warning” from a testy mod. Easy in the Pit but much more challenging in this forum.
Grease up the goat!
I thought that was what we were doing.
For what it’s worth, you provided a quality analysis: cogent, coherent, rational, intelligent and thorough. But you’re trying to have a rational discussion with lekatt. About woo. As shown, lekatt can react to an application of reason much like, well, like he just did. He very much wants to believe his myth, and epistemology can’t pry him away from it, not with high explosives. This is unsurprising, as his myth allows him to not fear death. And that’s pretty damn hard to take away from someone if they don’t want it to be taken away. What’s a bit of illogical apologetics compared to the terror of the grave?
I was actually wondering why you’d decided to play Sisyphus until I noticed your join date, and then meant to give you a heads up. As has already been stated, the fight against ignorance has definitely signed an armistice on this front. Good work though.
Thanks for the kind words. I kind of enjoyed the mental workout, but I was hoping for a little actual, uh, debate from Mr. L. I spent a couple of hours on that %#$@ post. Oh well.
I am a vegetarian, but I enjoy goat cheese, for what it’s worth. Goat grease? Not so much.
Definitely not. lekatt’s here for everyone.
Amen and Amen.
So you can tell if someone is psychic by their intent or emotion? I am unclear on this–do you know these people personally so that you can hear them speak? Or you are saying that you can read what someone else wrote about, say about Noreen Renier you can tell if she is a psychic? Or are you saying that from reading her words you can tell if she is real or not?
Am I a psychic? Can you tell from what I have written here? Am I being honest here? Please elaborate on what you mean by the above post so that I get an idea of how you tell if someone is a real psychic or a fake psychic.
thank you in advance
So if someone was pranking you repeatedly and over a long period of time in order to make a point in Great Debates you’d pick up on that, right? Someone like, ooh, now that guy, what was his name again? Dr Catholic? Dog Catheter? Nah, that’s not it. Anyway, you wouldn’t be fooled by anyone like that now, would you? You’d know within a few posts if he was yanking your chain, wouldn’t you?
Bayard do a search on “lekatt” in thread titles in the Pit.
This particular pit thread is a great primer. You have to realise that you are debating an internet (and indeed usenet) legend.
If you really want to get into the detail you could always read this little thread. It only goes for 36 pages, but it will give you a fair understanding nonethess;)
Yes, as everyone knows, children are much harder to dupe than adults.
At least lekatt is acknowledging a childlike credulity.