Apparently, polls are now the proper way to settle metaphysical issues. This guy claims to have evidence of life after death, based on claims about near-death experiences (NDEs), which are so convincing…not. People experiencing trauma and physiological shock, whose brains have received a nasty jar and have had the continuity of experience abruptly terminated, are not the best people to accurately describe the objective nature of the phenomenon; also, the mind is pretty darned good at filling in gaps in our experience with confabulations.
It’s an untrustworthy basis for believing in magical post-death transformations, but this guy has made it even worse. How does he test for life after death? He collects anecdotes on a web site — a kind of glorified pointless poll. So I suppose it is only natural that the article about the collection of tripe would put up a pointless poll of its own.
Do you believe in the afterlife?
82.2%
Yes.
7.7%
No.
10%
I’m not sure.
Using the methodology of these loons, I think that if we get a majority saying “No” it will mean that there is no life after death.
New group? “Institute for Waterboarding and Discovery of the Afterlife”. We need a believer. :D
But on a serious note, some young conservatives in my country (part of a political party) said:
“What’s wrong with waterboarding? It’s just like having a little bit of water splashed on your face.”
The wingnuts truly are taking over, I fear. The majority of people believe in angels as well.
If there is going to be an Rapture and Apocalypse, I found the bumper sticker I want:
“Your honor student was delicious”.
So… since the poll results are currently on Yes, that means the afterlife exists as a result. What you’re saying is, if I click No enough times, I can collapse the probability wave and destroy the hereafter?
Oh, the power… the power!
Near death experiences sound a lot like people’s alien abduction experiences.
No believer though will accept physical and psychological explanations for the phenomena.
Is there an afterlife? NO.
I still remember a Far Side cartoon that showed two men standing at a coffee urn in what was obviously HELL. The one said to the other: “They’ve thought of everything. Even the coffee is COLD!”
Results so far:
60.1%, Yes. 1,809 votes
32.1%, No. 967 votes
7.8%, I’m not sure. 236 votes
Then the Pharyngulite Ilk can boast that it destroyed heaven and hell!
Godlike power!
That story crashed my browser. Not cool.
Since our culture thinks it makes sense to poll about the truth of evolution, it can’t do any additional harm to treat the afterlife the same way.
But, do we deserve such power? Should we not use our godlike abilities to do good for the world, cure injustices, right wrongs, and solve crises?
…
NAH!!! Let the smitations begin!
Oui : cinquante-sept
Non : trente-cinq
The poll wasn’t to find out a definite answer. It was to find out what most people thought.
Polls can be are useful until P.Z. messes them up. What’s the point.
Tried to click “Submit” on the poll (after checking “no”) and nothing happened.
Maybe Firefox 3.6 doesn’t work right or the owner closed the poll before the results upset his belief system.
The poll wasn’t to find out a definite answer. It was to find out what most people thought. Polls can be are good until P.Z. messes them up. What’s the point.
Nobody having a supposed near death experience ever sees anything out of their range of vision that they would see if they were floating above their body, like a television monitor hidden behind a curtain. I guess the spirit of the eyeballs must stay behind. No wonder religious people are blind.
To show that internet polls are meaningless. Otherwise, the woo folks say this internet poll showed people believe us. You should too. So we can say, your poll results are not scientific, they could have been anti-Pharyngulated, therefore they are meaningless.
Of course there’s an afterlife… It’s called decomposition.
On the intertubes, it’s not just the wooists who get to vote by click. Our opinions count too.
I don’t get what’s so hard to understand. It’s really simple actually. After you stop living, you keep on living. Easy.
Yes – 51.5
No – 37.4
Don’t know – 7.5
(total 96.4?)
Anyways, the bright white light is growing dimmer
During my recent TIA, I experienced a craving for oranges. The craving is still with me several days later. My continuity of experience was interrupted for about an hour, but I’m sure that was part of God’s plan to reveal itself to me … as an orange. I am eating god daily, sometimes more than once.
This is proof. It’s personal. My experience of the true nature of reality has an emotional component, and a sensory component. And nobody who has experienced this would doubt it to be real.
Go suck an orange.
The loss of loved ones makes me grieve;
I need a reason to believe,
That once I give my dying breath
There’s something after death.
A question meant to stump the sages,
Pondered often, through the ages,
But now the greatest weapon yet:
I’ll poll the internet!
The wisdom of the gathered masses,
Trolls and spammers, other asses,
Who could doubt the social mind,
Whatever it may find!
Majorities are always right
And thus will help me in my plight;
It’s only my immortal soul–
It’s surely worth a poll!
your concern is noted. How is P.Z. messing them up? By leading more people to express their opinion on the subject? Isn’t that what they want, to find out what people think about the subject at ahand? It is only “messing it up” if the pollster has a predetermined objective for the poll, which belies the claim of “I just wanted to get a sense of people’s opinion”. The point is that with or without PZ’s interference, online, uncontrolled polls are useless for determining anything. The population of participants is inherently biased as no controls are implemented to make it a representative sample. “Pharyngulization” is simply meant to illustrate this in a dramatic way.
I had to exit Mozilla Firefox and invoke Internet Explorer in order to get my vote to “take.” As of 12:35 PM EST the YES responses were down to almost 52%…
What makes our votes any less valid than other people’s?
Why? Is it to lend credibility to an alleged but unsupported phenomena, or is it just a market study to test the value of a new movie script? Maybe something like “Ghost Returns” or something?
That also happened to me. If you view the results page, though, you can vote there with Firefox.
Question: Can you imagine a time when you are not? Second question: Do you believe in a time when you will not be?
Question left unasked: Do you have any evidence that your mind will continue when your body is clearly without life?
Gee, oddly enough, asking people if they like to think of themselves as immortal gets people answering that they’re immortal.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
I had the same problem, and even IE complained of an error on the page.
But…but…he’s using THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD! How can he be wrong???
“Of course, I had concerns as I put together the NDE website survey. For example, how could I tell for certain if the stories being told were valid? I pondered this question a lot and decided to rely on the tried-and-true scientific method of redundancy. Redundancy in interviewing means asking the same question (or questions that revolve around the same concept) several times in slightly different ways. For instance, in the demographic portion of the questionnaire, there is a box to check if the person had an out-of-body experience. One would expect that if this box was checked, then the answer to the question “Did you experience a separation of your consciousness from your body?” should be “Yes.” If we find inconsistencies in a person’s answers, we can check the narrative to see what the NDEr really experienced. Later, after large numbers of NDEs were shared, I was impressed at how consistent the responses were to the redundant questions.”
What more proof do you need, you nasty Pharyngulites?
Update: Yes – 52 %
No – 40 %
Seems the Pharyngula Effect™ is working its magic.
Everything considered, this is an amazingly sober result for a poll linked to an article regarding a book claiming to have proven that there really, truly is an afterlife.
Not magic. Clicky fingers are better than praying lips.
“What will it be like to not be?”
It’s a non-question, like “what’s north of the North Pole?” The answer is that it won’t be like anything because there won’t be anything for it to be like to.
Not attempting to say there is an afterlife, but scientifically speaking, isn’t it inaccurate to say there isn’t an afterlife since there isn’t any evidence saying it does NOT exist? I mean, unless someone has died, come back and said, nope, there ain’t no afterlife, there really isn’t any logical justification for claiming you know it doesn’t (and in the case above, it would actually show that not only there was an afterlife, but the guy was a liar to boot).
While I can see the possibility of proving that an afterlife exists, I have a hard time thinking of a way to disprove its existence, considering that the only way to test it would be to die, but then how do you report back you have no existence afterwards?
To me, questions about the afterlife are currently outside the realm of science as untestable. Therefore, the rational answer is to say I don’t know. You can choose to believe or not believe, but it is a theo-philosophical discussion and not one for science.
#11
“Polls can be are useful until P.Z. messes them up. What’s the point.”
In this day and age the fundamentally retarded tend to grasp what blade of grass they can, as they plummet of the cliff of rationality.
Polls like this give them statistical gravitas…in their opinion…to claims of all sorts of nonsense.
The likes of AiG and the discovery institute would be in the forefront of claiming empirical victory and overwhelming support of mediocre and inane delusions.
These polls are not scientific, they are not definitive and they are not indicative.
They are not meant to be so…in the main they seem to be fundy porno that they can rub up against.
I suggest it is made plain that they cannot be used as ‘gospel’ truth.
The religiously challenged expect to get away with all sorts of demands and pontifications.
And use any statistic they can grub up!
It would be churlish not to let them know that they do not own the block!
@tsg:
Everything, if you fail at directions.
Oh, there is always some way to twist everything, even if the poll flipped. Checkout the response from the National Catholic Register’s criticism of Dawkins attempt to prove that atheists are charitable: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/atheists_love_you._they_just_dont_know_why/
Correct. There’s just as much evidence supporting the existence of leprechauns as there is an “afterdeath”.
By the way, disproving negative truth claims about reality is not possible or productive.
No evidence of non-existence is needed. There is no evidence of its existence, and therefore no reason to think it exists.
If the afterlife is observable, then science can answer whether or not it exists. If it isn’t, then nobody can know anything about it. The rational answer is that people’s experiences leading them to believe there is an afterlife can and do have mundane explanations that don’t require an afterlife to explain them.
I know for sure there is no afterlife. I’ve died a bunch of times, and each time, I never lived again!
(ahem)
This statement is just silly. Anything untestable is outside the realm of reality. Science is just a method of probing reality in an attempt to understand it. Being outside the realm of reality pretty much removes it from discussion about the real and renders it effectively non-existent.
IOW, they’re the same across cultures, except for the differences.
Throw out the Buddhist and Shinto affects, along with the Xian ones, and you have, by Jove, similar types of experiences. You know, suggesting that there really is such a thing as an NDE experience, proving that we must live beyond our deaths.
Just don’t ask for everyone to describe the same objects, quite unlike what you would expect from visiting the Eiffel tower.
Note, too, that the writer keeps saying that NDEs must be real, which he obviously conflates with being true indications of an afterlife.
BTW, have these morons never asked why the supernatural world is so stupid as to think that the person is certain to die, pulls their spirits out of their bodies, then has to stick them back into their pathetic bodies when they unexpectedly live (the physicians at least know that they might pull through, the spirits don’t)? And can’t they do anything to fix their bodies, if they’re going to eject them from paradise?
And why don’t they just come by with evidence for the afterlife if they’re willing to let NDE subjects return to tell us? Are they trying to keep it a secret, or not? Either they’re idiots unable to keep secrets, or idiots unable to get a rather simple fact across to us.
As always, then, the spirits are, you know, just out of reach, but able to be apprehended by the “true believers.” Who are blessed for being credulous.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
There’s no direct evidence to say that it doesn’t exist, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that consciousness is no more than the biological workings of a brain and thus when the brain stops consciousness stops. As something that can’t be evidenced and fails to fit with what we know about life, it’s quite a superfluous notion (I’d say it’s about on the same level as Russell’s teapot floating about.)
From an article I read a while back is this example. No citation, so take it as anecdote.
Condensed:
Two soldiers at a beach head get strafed by an enemy plane. One of them is toast, the other suffers shock trauma and goes unconscious. He “leaves” his body and sees the situation around him and his buddy. He comes-to at a triage and describes what he “saw”. His description was completely wrong.
Similar things happen in operating rooms where the patient describes in great detail the things they “saw” while “floating” over their “dead” body during surgery. Most of what they describe is completely false.
@ Lynna #20:
I’m too ill at present (including having a sore throat). So god’s just going to have to wait to get sucked off … or find some volunteers elsewhere (preferably without zapping them all with TIAs to make them do it).
‘Yes’ is now less than 1% above ‘no’.
Keep Pharynulating, folks.
Having been dead for a short while and NOT experiencing the classic NDE tunnel and light biz I can happily say: “Been there. Done that. Nothing there.”
Personally, I’d put god in a blender with an egg, some ice, vodka, and sugar; bring it all to a whip and pour into a chilled glass. Kind of like a Russian Orange Julius.
We’re winning!
Yes: 43.9% (2450)
No: 49.8% (2782)
Maybe: 6.3% (353)
Bjorn @ 36
I just read that article. What a gobshite… :-/
#36
“National Catholic Register”
Oh…them!
What is to be expected from a puppet mouth piece that blindly supports every fart any catolik ju ju crow inflicts on society?
There has been no retraction and certainly no apology for Cardinal pontifications that insist that atheists are sub-human.
Charming little toe rags trumpet respect and reason at any ear in the vicinity and fail abysmally at their own dogma.
I mean we can trust the RCC to be probably the most viscous, ignorant, intolerant and bigoted shit stains on the planet.
Abusers, perverts and liars…will always find a loving home in their institution.
And they will be protected from those unreasonable sorts on the outside that do not see their shenanigans in quite the same light as Benny baby!
Voted No, but it’s close, 49.1 no; 43.6 yes. I can’t take the comments without a whole lot more tea.
@ lose_the_woo #46:
So you’d mix god with the demon drink. ;-)
You could make the eggs devilled ones and add some angel food cake (or fairy cakes) to be even more equitable in your treatment of the supernatural.
Any more possible ingredients?
I have to make one more complaint, if not a major one. The “poll question” is “Do you believe in the afterlife?” Like, “Do you believe in the Eiffel Tower” or some other definite and singular fact.
A non-leading (less leading, at least) question would be “Do you believe that we live after death” or “Do you believe in an afterlife.” The definite article used before “afterlife” is not appropriate in a fair poll question.
It’s like asking “Do you believe in the God?” Most theists wouldn’t even put the question that way, knowing it was unfair and that it would be challenged.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
@ SEF #51
Well, he’s such a prick so it seemed appropriate. Besides, us atheist-devils all hate god anyway!
As far as ingredients go, how about a little “flare” instead. Add a splash of Everclear on top and ignite it just before serving. Then we could call it the “Flaming Yahweh” – adding a “poke in the eye” name as a finishing touch.
No, scientifically one does not postulate the existence of something until it is disproven. Scientifically one tries to disprove the non-existence of an effect. That is what the null-hypothesis is. A scientific experiment asks, “are these results inconsistent with being due purely to chance?” Only when you can say that it is very unlikely to be due to pure chance do you allow that it might therefore be due to some real phenomenon. You do not disprove that the effect exists, you do not prove that it doesn’t exist, you disprove that it does not.
Scientifically, you do not accept leprechauns exist until they can be disproven; you assume they do not exist until there is enough evidence that would be inconsistent with their non-existence.
Well, that’s not surprising, really…
There is a desire in the general public for the afterlife to be true. This poll, and in fact, the debate at large, isn’t really a discussion as to whether or not the afterlife is true. As was already pointed out by lose_the_woo, it’s an untestable hypothesis, and therefor out of the realm of reality, not just science.
The people commenting there don’t know if there is an afterlife… and they can’t really make any worthwhile argument in support of a case for an afterlife.. no, what the poll, the comments, and the article itself conveys is nothing more than the outward expression of the inherent human fear of death. One of the serious side-effects of being self-aware, or sentient, is also bearing a terrifying fear of losing that sentience by way of death. People really want to believe in an afterlife, because the thought that someday you will just cease to be who you are… your thoughts, your feelings, your very being, is too frightening for most to accept.
From the article in the link
I’m not really surprised, because, as people like this talk out of their asses, so maybe their consciousness usually exists up their asses too.
I have had 2 Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Both times my heart stopped. The most recent was January 2, 2010. I was out so long they feared brain damage and put me on ice for 36 hours.
I did NOT see an light. I did NOT see any tunnels. I did NOT see anyone hanging around.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
Sorry, theists, but there is no one out there.
Here’s a cute comment:
So much FAIL in one little paragraph.
See, there’s evidence for a soul! Photos that everyone has seen! Frackin’ empirical scientific fact! Plus silver etheric fishing line.
I just don’t remember seeing the Celestial Sciences in any curriculum. Do they mean Astronomy?
Ah, I see that article mentions Betty J. Eadie and her book, Embraced by the Light. I’ve actually read it, and since at the time, she was claiming to be Mormon*, it was selling like hotcakes. My neighbour had it and let me borrow it. When people get all excited about how detailed it is, it makes me want to bonk my head against something.
Incidentally, I have near-death experiences EVERY fricking night. I keep having the belief or sensation while going into REM that I have just died or am in the process of dying. Granted, there’s no warm and fuzzy light drawing me towards it, but several times a week I think I’ve died in my sleep. I’m told that the whole “stop breathing while sleeping” freakout is a common symptom of sleep apnea, so I may have to get that checked out. But my point is that I have VERY VERY VIVID dreams that I remember in the morning, a great number of which involve me being dead or hanging out with dead grandparents and the like. And guess what? They are just dreams. Given my most generous interpretation, NDEs are very likely just dreams that the patient has while recovering from the thing wot nearly killed them.
I’ve also wakened during surgery, which mostly consisted of me trying to say, “Is it over yet?” I’ve had some further interesting dreams under the influence of hospital drugs and whatnot, but still I somehow don’t regard these as evidences for my afterlife.
*Eadie wasn’t as forthcoming outside of Utah, and in the evangelical markets, coyly described herself as Christian. On her current site she doesn’t describe herself as anything, and I think the LDS church had issues with her at one point. (They get kinda squiffy if anybody starts turning up with authority from god without going through them.)
….
re: other cultures ND experiences – I’ve heard the opposite–that other cultures have very different NDEs than what we do. (The example I heard is that Japanese tend to think about bodies of water in their NDEs….oceans, rivers, ponds. No shiny light. Does this mean that the Japanese afterlife is very different?)
@ daveau #58
That is about the most precious comment about the topic I’ve ever read. Nice find.
I think I’m going to frame it and mount it on my religious wall of shame at home.
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” — Twain, Mark
I mean we can trust the RCC to be probably the most viscous, ignorant, intolerant and bigoted shit stains on the planet.
Abusers, perverts and liars…will always find a loving home in their institution.
i dunno, sounds like they’re at least tolerant.
;)
@#58: Are we quite sure that comment wasn’t written facetiously?
This is empirical scientific fact. Most people today aren’t educated in any way toward the celestial sciences so they can’t respond easily.
ummm, true, I suppose.
In the same way it would be difficult for me to respond to the personal delusions of a schizophrenic.
Also…
“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.”
– Epicurus
I have had 2 Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Both times my heart stopped. The most recent was January 2, 2010. I was out so long they feared brain damage and put me on ice for 36 hours.
you should change your handle to “BouncebackBob”!
It’s true — I just upgraded mine from Cat5e to Cat6.
I think the afterlifers have been hitting a bit too much of the whatnot.
NewEnglandBob-
Glad to have you back with the living.
lose_the_woo & alysonmiers-
The “I Am” person who made that comment made many others, claiming multiple lives, etc. Seems to be sincere, or a fantastic poe. If you have time for a laugh, you should read the comments on the poll. After your tea, of course. Maybe something stronger.
Life after death? Sure! My body will die, and some of the bits that are currently me will eventually get added to a worm, fungus, or something else that’s alive. Probably several things. Life will go on much the same as it has since life started living, and I’ll eventually forget that I am grateful for my brief chance to exist.
Consciousness after death? Awareness after death? Well, I suppose others will still be aware and conscious even after I’m not. Awareness will still exist.
If a vote is cast on a poll for all the wrong interpretations, does it still make an integer increment?
*click*
pffft… you’d better upgrade that to Cat6a or Cat7 if you want your spirit to connect at 10Gb at any real distance…
It’s now at 55% No. I was watching a show on the Science Channel called the Science of Cold. A Swedish woman and her friend were retelling how she was dead for 3 hours after falling in an icy river while cross country skiing. The doctors were able to bring her back to life. She holds the record for having the coldest core temp EVER on a human that was brought back to life. She has NO memory of anything that happened while she died or afterward. No afterlife. Just nothingness. This was not a NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE. This was a 3 hour dead as a doornail experience.
PZ:
How are these near-death experiences any different from a really vivid, full-color, Hi-Def, fully interactive, surround-sound dream?
If I have an accident and tell you that I saw my dead granny and a bunch of other stiffs beckoning to me from The LightTM, why is that considered more real than the dream where a bevy of naked lesbians are masturbating with bibles… at the Mormon Tabernacle in Utah, while the choir does covers of The Carpenter’s greatest hits?
Technical point for anyone else who is using the NoScript Firefox extension – you have to enable popups from today.msnbc.com in order to see the survey. This is unusual in my experience. Usually, you just allow the local domain and some polling outfit to run Javascript and it works.
So, if you don’t see the survey panel (it’s about midway down the page) that’s something to consider.
Curses! Votemined! Why, those stupid soulless machines with no sense of morality beyond that which their programmer simplistically programmed!
BTW, we’re currently winning the “Silver threads? How precious!” vote:
39.1% Yes.3,047 votes
55.2% No. 4,304 votes
5.6%I’m not sure.440 votes
Come on guys, still on the wire?! That’s so ’90s. It’s time to cut the cord and go wireless!
< < To me, questions about the afterlife are currently outside the realm of science as untestable.>>
>This statement is just silly. Anything untestable is outside the realm of reality. Science is just a method of probing reality in an attempt to understand it. Being outside the realm of reality pretty much removes it from discussion about the real and renders it effectively non-existent.>
Now this statement is just plain silly. There are infinitely large numbers of things that are untestable yet are still in reality. Anything we can’t observe in some fashion is inherently untestable. For instance, how do you really know that what you observe as red is the same thing I observe as red or simply a factor that as we were growing up we were both told a certain color was red. We can measure the wavelengths going in, we can measure neural activity, but since it has been proven that perception is as much a product of our experience as it is anything we actually see, this really doesn’t answer the question. But neither one of us either poofs out of existence nor are we struck color-blind simply because of our inability to test it.
As to the others that responded to my post, you are raised valid points, but I think you missed my point. It is a logical and scientific fallacy to state something does not exist when you have no evidence of it. Leprechauns if they existed would have a solid substance that could be looked for. Since people have looked and turned up no evidence for their existence outside of fairy tales, we can conclude that at this point, the evidence says they don’t exist. However, this is because we can test for their existence by looking for them. Until someone comes up with a valid experiment to directly test the exitence of an afterlife, it is scientifically and logically invalid to say conclusively that it doesn’t exist. It IS valid to say there is currently no substantiated evidence for its existence.
As scientists and/or rational beings, we have to be very careful not to confuse our lack of knowledge for certainty of nonexistence. We can say we see no evidence for it, but we CAN NOT say validly that we KNOW. Otherwise, it seems to me that you are doing the same thing you are accusing the religious nutcases of doing.
Oops, I meant to type “you all” rather than “you are”. Please forgive the occasional typo.
My own death does not frighten me, but the deaths of others is terrifying.
It would be lovely to believe that my daughter continues somewhere, but the wanting isn’t enough to make it true.
From the comments in the link:
God will punish me forever because I don’t believe in it? What a sadistic asshole it is. Any god that’ll punish me for disbelief isn’t worthy of my belief.
Someone should write a tale about how eternal afterlife makes all the sublimated souls absolutely insane. This would include God, the Angels, Satan, and the demons. They attempt to destroy each other and the Earth in the process.
The Earth successfully defends itself with the help of a few of the more recent dead who’d not yet lost their marbles, but in the process, Heaven and Hell are destroyed and immortality is lost forever.
Tough economic times… god won’t spring for a decent AAA server and I’m certainly not leaving my eternal soul wide open to damned spirit-identity thieves… so tethered I must remain.
No. By definition, untestable, means untestable. It’s not a word game or perception trick. Something that is completely untestable, undetectable by any means, is effectively non-existent.
What you are talking about are things that may be testable, not things that are untestable.
Produce something falsifiable about any positive truth claim about an “afterlife”. Wait, first define in specific terms what an “afterlife” even means or may be.
Those who make positive truth claims about reality bear the burden of producing evidence. Proving there is no “afterlife” (a negative truth claim) is useless where there is no evidence for it in the first place.
Now stop being silly.
*Fetches popcorn*
Fail, Fail, science FAIL.
*Opens hot dog stand for spectators*
BTW – here’s another poll, this one about the biblesights: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/01/19/2010-01-19_firm_takes_flak_for_rifle_scopes_with_bible_verse.html
Indeed, you’d think that the creator would have created us with the inability to disbelieve if he wanted us to believe in him. You’d also think that something that powerful wouldn’t be that petty and wouldn’t care if we believe.
Yahweh sounds more like a human despot who can’t handle criticism.
Please give an example or three.
From the article:
I see the writer included the usual persecuted-minority trope — people who have evidence for spiritual truths are being ignored and laughed at and not taken seriously by scientific authorities.
“They won’t listen to me!”
Awwww. Poor crushed guy. Can you imagine how you’d feel, if it was you?
People eat that shit up. And, of course, the uncaring doctor is contrasted with the caring nurses who listen. And take everything at face value — because being caring means you can’t be analytical.
Why can’t it be both? Near Death Experiences are real — AND they’re fantasies. They’re marvelous brain experiences which are accounted for neurologically, and their similarities across many people signify common human tendencies in physiology and psychology.
I’m reading an interesting book right now which I just got for my birthday; it’s apparently out of print, but had been recommended by Bob Carroll at “Skeptic’s Dictionary.” There’s a forward by Ray Hyman. It’s titled The Psychology of Transcendence: A guide to understanding and developing your potential for mental healing, visions, ecstasy, out-of-body states, prophecy, and many other extraordinary experiences.
With a title like that it sounds like it’s going to be credulous New Age bullshit, but from what I can tell so far it’s actually a reasonable, science-based examination of what is going on psychologically and neurologically when people have unusual ‘transcendent’ experiences. The author argues that we can lose the unreasonable (and unnecessary) metaphysical speculations about the cosmos, and understand, value, and even use these experiences to help us in our lives. It’s skepticism — not in the dismissive “it’s all nonsense” sense — but with the approach that “it’s even more interesting when it’s not magic.”
I recommend.
This is very stupid. There are an infinite number of things that are untestable. Which just means they are untestable and says zero about whether they are real.
There is also a lot that is testable. It is known as the Real World. Most, but not all of us live in….the Real World. It’s not so bad, try it some time.
That, I agree with. However, I used the term effectively non-existent, which is meant to convey the notion of beyond reasonable doubt, which I think is in agreement with your assertion about absolute knowledge on the matter.
No, no, no, as everyone knows leprechauns are magic, and so can magically hide when they are looked for. You can’t prove that isn’t true.
Besides, there are various reports of people interacting with leprechauns — don’t those count?
And there is currently no substantiated evidence for the existence of lost Lemuria, the island of the Third Root Race of seven foot tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying reptiles that are our spiritual predecessors. And there is currently no substantiated evidence for the existence of a race of tall blonde women in the jungles of Venus who occasionally kidnap men from Earth to be their sex slaves. And there is currently no substantiated evidence for the existence of a giant invisible space squid orbiting Neptune. Or orbiting Uranus. Or Saturn. Or Mercury. Or the Empire State Building. Or the Eiffel Tower.
In fact there is currently no substantiated evidence for the existence of an infinite number of possible things.
So, do you hold all such beliefs to be as plausible as an afterlife? If not, why not?
From my perspective, we have reason to believe the afterlife exists to exactly the same likelihood we have to believe Lemuria exists. And, where I come from, we informally refer to things with such likelihoods of existing as “nonexistent”. Otherwise, the whole notion of nonexistence becomes problematic for anything outside of formal systems.
Maybe this nutjob is one of those folk who spends thousands of dollars per metre on speaker cables?
There are infinitely large numbers of things that are untestable yet are still in reality.
this is the mentality that must be maintained, in the face of all obvious counters, in order to continue being religious.
In fact, it would be readily predicted by anyone familiar with how human minds actually work.
does that make it in any way plausible or even accurate?
nope.
More comments (because they’re so good:
OK. When I was 4 I persistently dreamed that giants came and took me away in a flying saucer. And I could look out and see my house and my parents looking for me but they couldn’t find me. And when they couldn’t find me, they moved away to a new house, so me and the flying saucer giants went looking for them. And then I woke up. Same thing, really.
> Apparently, polls are now the proper way to settle metaphysical issues.
In all fairness, I have to point out that this method certainly beats the old-fashioned thumbscrew, rack, and burn-them-to-a-crisp approaches. Not to mention the more recent send-an-angry-mob-to-attack-the-publisher scenario.
@ jdmimic
I’m not sure if it’s your use of imprecise language or your misunderstanding of what science is or how reality effectively seems to work which is causing you grief.
Hopefully if you read the responses to your assertions about existence you’ll clear up your misconceptions.
I personally liked Tulse’s @ #92.
But… but my own personal (albiet slightly skitzofrenic*) imaginary spirit promised me that by choosing It instead of Him, upon my death I would get a formal invite to the Great All You Can Eat Buffet in the (90-Degree-Phase-Shifted-From-Reality-So-Don’t-Bother-Looking-For-It) Upper Troposphere! Followed by reincarnation as a… carnation… or something like that.
Anyways, it sounded like a good idea at the time, but now I’m confused… Will I have to eat at the buffet while I’m on fire? That sounds rather impolite to me…
*But aren’t they all?
No it isn’t.
Is it a lie to tell someone that Santa Claus doesn’t exist? Despite the fact that we can plausibly explain how such a fiction arose?
We can do the same (perhaps with a few less specifics) with God or the afterlife.
Only when we’re being very precise, or an a-hole (depending on context), do we have to state that “there is no evidence for Santa Claus” rather than “Santa isn’t real.” The proper philosophical statement would be that we’re without evidence of Santa’s existence, but in the vernacular we can just say that Santa doesn’t exist.
This is not a philosophically precise forum, hence we are perfectly justified to use the vernacular “there is no afterlife.”
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
When I was a nurse I had to listen to a patient try and feed me this crap. The sincerity of her belief, I believe was genuine, but obviously the experience a false one. In other words I think she actually believed what she thought she saw but her brain was so scrambled from the trauma she was remembering other experiences.
For example she related to me what she had “seen” in theatre during her surgery. I’d actually been in during her op and what she related was a the “picture perfect” theatre scene of how a layperson thinks theatre is- kind of the thing you see in something like Grey’s Anatomy or such ilk. She never once described seeing us all bitching about the canteen food or the new administrator, never once mentioned how the Anaethestist got the shits cause we told him his jokes were crap and he spent the rest of the surgery reading his Time mag, and never once related how the Surgeon spent most of the time relating how he’d lost his wallet the week before. Normal, usual stuff and she never once mentioned any of it.
All of her vision had been dark green scrubs ( which we didn’t wear – all pale blue, pinks and florals) and talk of unspecfic “machines” ( no doubt of the kind that go “ping”). Her version of what went down when she had her cardiac arrest (which obviously she was brought back from, no thanks to us mind you, it was all a miracle of “God”) was, frankly, insulting to the professionalism of our doctors. Only in the movies does that panicky crap go on- in real life we’re quite calm and ordered.
I tried to explain this to her (in a nice way), that her brain was merely feeding her an old episode of MASH or something but she wasn’t having it. She was convinced she’d had a NDE and was off to tell the world about it. Meh.
Is Jdmimic a sockpuppet of eric?
jdmimic #77 wrote:
Technically true. Testing requires an ability to duplicate to an extent, and inherently subjective, personal experiences don’t fit the criteria. I think some of your critics are confusing “can’t be tested” with “can’t be detected.”
Again, technically correct — but there’s a sliding scale of connotation in what we mean when we say we “know” something. In common use, it usually means that we know it “well enough” for all practical purposes.
I think that life after death is more or less in the same category as the claim that rocks and trees are conscious. Given what we know about the brain, life, and consciousness, it’s reasonable to say that both of these hypotheses are false. The uncertainty comes in when we speculate “but what if everything we think we know is wrong — could it be true, then?”
Given that situation, then yes. But that, of course, is a hollow victory for the believer.
By the way, I personally know people — intelligent, educated people — who do believe that rocks and trees are conscious. I didn’t just pick some bizarre example from nowhere to contrast belief in life after death with, to diminish it. I suspect the main reason many people are willing to remain neutral or agnostic on life after death, but not on thinking rocks and trees, is cultural familiarity.
“Maybe what you see as red would look like blue to me.” No, it wouldn’t. Because you call it red. We all1 call it red. And when we identify the color as red, the light always has the same wavelength. So what the hell are you talking about? More importantly, what does it matter?
[1] Or, more accurately, a large enough number of people that puts it out of the range of chance.
Sastra @89, that book sounds really cool.
Uh…no. You are using this term “logical and scientific fallacy” incorrectly. It is fallacious to make a positive assertion without positive evidence. It is entirely reasonable to make the corresponding negative assertion when no positive evidence exists.
What would count as evidence that the afterlife doesn’t exist? Unless you can come up with a usable answer to that, there’s no reason why we godless skeptical heathens can’t assume the afterlife is a non-reality.
@Bride of Shrek: I can’t even begin to imagine how frustrating this must’ve been for you. I mean, when I see people saying things like that on TV shows I just feel like screaming at my screen (I sometimes do. My TV’s my bitch.). I have no doubt that I’d just want to give this woman a few slaps behind the head. First for her ingratitude, second for her ignorance.
There are reputable books on near-death experiences and, as with the case for evolution, the conclusions are not challenged. You can get some pretty weird hallucinations, but they are nothing more than hallucinations. Yet, like creationists, there are idiots who refuse to believe what’s in the reputable books and would rather make up some nonsense of their own to sell to the gullible.
Name one.
Mathematicians will strongly disagree. A fair amount of mathematics deals with entities which don’t exist, yet statements can be made about those entities with absolute certainty.
The current pointless poll results:
8,822 votes
38% Yes (3350)
56.4% No (4979)
5.6% I’m not sure (493)
Tomorrow or whenever the poll closes, they should have one of the serious journalists on the Today show report the numbers and that there is no afterlife.
The comments what come with the poll are simply priceless.
Michelle R
Not so much frustrating as sad really. Naturally I had empathy for her, she’d just been through a horrible experience and was in a lot of pain but sad that she was, without thinking about it, using this situation to support or back up her kooky religious ideas
Maybe she and her (deceased) husband used to sit enjoying hours of watching MASH together and that’s what she was remembering- whatever. To me, obivous her brain was in actuality doing it’s job, in reverting her to remembering old happy experiences rather than painful current ones. To her, it was another supporting sign that her god existed and he wanted her to proselytize to the world about this “proof”
I did however get pissed about the “miracle” thing. They never thank the 2 doctors and 3 nurses that worked on her for 8 minutes to keep her alive, never thank the educational system that gave them their training or their parents/spouses/whatever that put up with them through the years of hard study it took to get to this level of skill.
No. They thank god. Miracle my arse.
Playing a bit of devil’s advocate here…
Perhaps jdmimic meant to say “currently” untestable…which I would agree with. That does not make these things “untestable” but we might currently lack the facilities to do so.
100 years ago there were many things that we could not test for…because we lacked the ability. There are probably things that exist in reality (or the REAL world, if you prefer) that we cannot currently test for and will not be able to test for another 100 years, but that does not mean they do not exist.
As for things that I think/believe are real but currently untestable? Human emotions come to mind…personal preferences…the existence of life on other planets…just to name three. But I also believe we draw closer and closer to making these “testable” every day.
Some classics from the Onion:
Heaven Less Opulent Than Vatican, Reports Disappointed Pope
Mother Teresa Sent To Hell In Wacky Afterlife Mix-Up
Report: 92 Percent Of Souls In Hell There On Drug Charges
Hopefully this version of that last link will work:
Report: 92 Percent Of Souls In Hell There On Drug Charges
Do you realize that we can test for color-blindness? And that what I call “red” may be testably different from what another person sees?
But of course that wasn’t your point, any more than you honestly and unequivically responded to what the earlier person had written.
The difference is that I’m getting to the fact that the testability of color-blindness does relate to what science can know about our different experiences of qualia, as well as what we can otherwise know about it–the two are essentially the same, or rather, science extends what we can know about different experiences of qualia.
If we don’t experience “red” the same, who cares? The point of shared experience or “intersubjectivity” is simply that we can agree about matter like seeing “red,” and we know nothing for sure about the experience of the other person (OTOH, neuroscience and evolution point to close agreement of experience when the sensory organs are apparently similar and so are the brains).
More to the point, who the hell ever said that we know our sensory experiences are the same? You’re clearly fallacious in attacking your ridiculous strawman.
If you dealt with the other person’s statement in context you’d not be going into the untestable “intersubjective” issues that precede science. I don’t know precisely what that person meant, but you had no justification for going beyond the obvious, which was what we can establish about “objects existing” beyond “intersubjective agreements.”
IOW, you’re showing how a person can use philosophy to be an a-hole. I’m well aware of the issues involved (indeed, establishing any kind of “reality” beyond my consciousness is problematic), but I generally avoid bringing up the (in context) nonsense you do which doesn’t involve what is actually being discussed.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
NDE – “Not Dead, Evidently …”
Alec.
Wow, some of you people are simply amazing. You are willing to turn your vitriol and hate against even one of your own as soon as they voice the possibility that any differing opinion or even a question concerning it might be valid.
Not talking to everyone here of course (some of you responded in ways that disagreed with the idea without resorting to insults and that is great), simply those that think rational discourse is done simply by insulting the other person. That is a classic method used by people who have either stopped thinking or have nothing to support what they are saying 9or have gotten so tired of rationally discussing something with an idiot that they give up, but something is seriously wrong if that is the way you approach everyone).
If you can’t frame an argument with resorting to personal insults, you really have no business trying to argue a question of logic. There simply isn’t any reason to try to discuss anything with anyone who acts that way.
If you consider yourself a civilized and reasonably intelligent individual, raise yourself above petty insults. Separate yourself from the actions of those you despise or you lump yourself in with them.
To the person who asked for examples, I already did.
As to the mathematicians, true, but I was talking about testing things in the real world. If one posits laws that differ from the known universe, one can indeed make statements with certainty given the constraints of the system in which they are working in, but I would hope they would not confuse the theoretical work with making certain statements outside of their theoretical construct. I can posit a world in which 1+1=3 and form a valid mathematical framework around it, but I would certainly be remiss in trying to use it in reality. While a great deal of math is used in science, science and math can not be used interchangeably.
Of course there are thing that are real but untestable. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a good example and my faith is His Noodliness is as strong as ever.
Souls, on the other hand, are a different matter. If there were any such things mysteriously interacting with human brain by now neuroscientists would have found some evidence of them. The existence of souls is as likely as the existence of goblins.
The concept of an afterlife simply does not match what we know of the brain and how it functions.
Time was, the heart was thought to be the place of the ‘soul’. The body was sort of a machine run by this soul. When the body wore out, then this soul coukd go the heaven – if the soul was good enough. Otherwise, the eternal barbecue.
Now we realize that our conscious and unconscious minds are the product of neurochemical interactions between the cells in the brain. These interactions have a completely physical basis – no mysterious force drives them. Whatever our minds are, they consist of whatever interactions take place. Physical interactions. The sort that cannot survive the death of the cells that carry them out.
You are willing to turn your vitriol and hate against even one of your own as soon as they voice the possibility that any differing opinion or even a question concerning it might be valid.
concern troll is concerned!
!!
To the person who asked for examples, I already did.
??
While a great deal of math is used in science, science and math can not be used interchangeably.
meaningless, irrelevant, drivel.
“one of our own”? tribalism doesn’t apply: either you have a good, solid argument, or you don’t; whether you’re a long-time poster or not is fairly irrelevant to that.
Also, tone trolls are fucking boring. They think they’re bringing us new and unique revelations, but in reality it’s just the hundredth time we have to rehash the same tired and long-refuted bullshit. SIWOTI Syndrome or not, it just gets really fucking frustrating that the trolls never have anything interesting and new to say.
That may or may not be true, but the flip side is also true: There are an infinitely large number of things that are untestable and aren’t in reality. And the problem is that if you can’t test, you can’t distinguish between those two types of things.
Stupid twat.
If you think you have cause to tell people how to speak you’d better come up with a whole lot better than your idiotic demand that we act like this is a forum concerned over the technicalities of philosophical language.
If you don’t want to be called a pedantic moron, or words to that effect, quit being one.
If you’d come in telling people how to discuss these matters in a properly philosophical sense, that would be one thing. You’d be seen as a pompous twit–unless you justified such an interjection somehow–but not as the jerk you are for telling people who never thought they were having any more than a discussion in the vernacular that they’re wrong for using vernacular language.
Since you attack strawmen and equivocate with respect to what is actually being discussed, though, you’re properly seen as a troll, who can be properly flamed.
Glen D
http:/tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Vitriol and hate? Really? You got hate from the responses you received?
That’s an almost christian-level persecution complex you’ve got there…
If you can’t attack the argument, attack the tone.
Buh-bye.
37.2%
Yes.
3,637 votes57.2%
No.
5,599 votes5.6%
I’m not sure.
545 votes
Good thing we have seen the kind of persecution complex the likes of jdmimic have before. You can’t disagree with them or challenge their claims without being accused of showing hatred and vitriol.
So predictable it is boring.
By the way jdmimic, do you consider the 72 virgins that the Islamic suicide attackers aspire to have a possibility even remotely worth considering? It doesn’t have to be testable to be true, remember?
I smell a drama queen exit coming….
Vitriol and hate? Really? You got hate from the responses you received?
That’s an almost christian-level persecution complex you’ve got there…
I smell a drama queen exit coming….
Sigh, no. I was just hoping for a rational discussion. no persecution complex, just disappointment.
That’s unfair, this place is apparently an echo chamber so why would we turn on one of our own? It can’t be both…
@ Dave #86
Where are those hot dogs? Are they ready yet?
Oh, yawn. You jumped into the piranha tank, and you got off far easier than many others. You’ve no business lecturing us about our tone.
rational discussion with one who holds an irrational position? how do you imagine that to work?
plus, what precisely is it about strong language that automatically precludes a serious discussion? I think you’re just whining because people aren’t willing to let your idiocies go uncalled.
As I recall, lack of that is how this all started. There are more than a few thoughtful responses to your initial assertions that you have left hanging. It seems you chose instead to create a strawman so you could handily defeat it.
Just sayin’
It’s a good thing that I’m intelligent but not at all civilised.
And again with the silly. Please stop the silly.
Not very charitable of you to call us fallacious equivocating pedantic fucktards.
Find a group who actually utilizes your equivocations and strawmen before you claim to be “one of your own” to that group.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Get down off the cross, we need the wood.
Heh… I thought I might see you over here with the “echo-chamber” comment after following the “new atheist time machine” thread…
You know it damn well, Kel… nothing but a bunch of head-nodders here that do nothing but agree with each-other while worshiping PZ… stop trying to pretend otherwise.
No one, especially not me, said anything about “certainty of nonexistence”. What I said is that science always assumes non-existence unless presented with compelling evidence that is inconsistent with that non-existence. Your earlier statement was that one should assume existence unless it can be demonstrated to not exist. That is not how science works, that is what scientists call “woo”.
Jdmimic: Ah, yes, the wonderful way that mathematics models the real world. For example: “If a straight line crossing two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.” (That’s Euclid’s fifth postulate, that given a line and a point not on the line, there is exactly one line through the point that is parallel to the first line.) Nice, matches our intuition, and people spent 2000 years trying to prove it. They still teach it in high school math. And it doesn’t match the physical universe we live in.
And it’s still useful for a lot of purposes.
Zero@61
Nice Twain quote!
New pharyngula poll:
is there life between deaths? Yes
No
B
Brilliant poll. Some of the comments are hilarious yet scary.
I think it was one of my calculus profs that said mathematics was neither real nor false, but the dividing line between reality and fiction. It’s stuck with me throughout my years and experience.
Not that I’m interested in any philosophical wrangling about the merits and complexities of the various maths. I simply wouldn’t have much to contribute and would rather leave those discussions for those who care.
JDmimic:
One thing I’ve learned from a couple of years of lurking and posting at this site is similar to what we used to say on the basketball court when I was kid:
“Come strong, or don’t come at all.”
In other words, be prepared to defend your argument. Concede when the logic of your argument fails, and learn to make a better case for future arguments.
Pharyngula is a great place to acquire those skills. it can be rough, but if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be any fun.
Now hit the showers.
I suggest the cardinality of the nontestable, non-real infinity is far greater than the cardinality of the non-testable, real infinity.
For every non-testable real thing, there is an infinite number of non-testable non-real things.
Ultimately, all other things being equal, that which is real but is untestable is effectively not real. There may be a force that permeates the universe but leaves no trace. How is it in any way distinguishable from a non-real force that has equal effect?
The instant something affects reality, it becomes measurable. As soon as it is measurable, it becomes testable. Maybe we don’t have the technology or the knowledge required to test it, but it becomes measurable, and therefore testable.
Anything that is not testable (whether or not we have the current knowledge or technology required to test it) is effectively not part of reality.
My preferred explanation: If a thing’s existence is indistinguishable from its non-existence, then it doesn’t exist. Otherwise, the word “exist” ceases to have any meaning.
When did you become a singular entity? I’m so very confused…
You’ve been offered rational discussion — various posters, including myself, have presented arguments against your position. Instead of whining about tone, how about actually responding to the substance of those arguments?
jdmimic #116 wrote:
From what I can tell, you’re a civilized and reasonably intelligent individual, and were jumped on. Okay. Civilized and reasonably intelligent people live through that pretty well.
There are two good ways to “raise yourself above petty insults.”
1.) Don’t make petty insults: just stick to the issue.
2.) Don’t notice petty insults: just stick to the issue.
If you don’t follow that second rule, the discussion will go off even further into the direction you don’t want. I bet you can test that.
“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.” -Delos McKown
Celtic_Evolution:
All the other demons are away on vacation, so it’s just me, Asmadaus, soul-sitting this televangelist.
What a bloodbath. You people are evil.
I enjoyed the Prof. Dendy thing too … unremitting savagery. So beautiful.
Here’s another poll that desperately needs to be Pharyngulated!!!
http://www.examiner.net/
It talks about having prayer before government meetings. Scroll down half way. It’s on the right.
Thanks! :)
@ coughlanbrianm #152
I’d watch it with the insults there buddy if you want to be considered one of us.
*removes tongue from cheek*
Too bad you don’t even know what “rational” means, jdmimic. Suggesting others accept claims that are not based on evidence doesn’t count.
Any word on how likely you consider the Islamic paradise yet? You know there is absolutely no shortage of Muslims who claim to have had a vision of that (while having a brush with death, no less). That settles it, right?
Yes. 36.1%
3,940 votes
No. 58.5%
6,382 votes
I’m not sure. 5.4%
588 votes
Total of 10,910 votes
I’d watch it with the insults there buddy if you want to be considered one of us.
eeep!
Seeing as they’ve got everything else about this wrong, I’d think that using floating point then rounding off to the nearest integer would be more their style. If we Pharyngulate this correctly, they’ll need scientific notation to represent the YES vote as a percentage ;-)
Bride Of Shrek OM @ #110
Thank you for saving the crazy lady.
I hope that there will be good folks like you to help keep me going when I need you.
Thank you again.
“Apparently, polls are now the proper way to settle metaphysical issues.”
But PZ, we live in a democracy. Every individual’s opinion is equally valid and whichever opinion the most people share is the truth. It’s fair and balanced.
Personally I love it when the pharyngulites are brawling. It goes to show that there is no orthdoxy to who we are as a group. All we can do is present our thoughts, keep it logically consistent and try to work from the ground up. When people get pissed off here, more often than not it’s because they really, really care about the truth.
But if you dispute this post you will flayed alive in the afterthread.
B
Near-deathals, back to your caves!
Dammit, you’d think a scientist making an internet poll would let people using Firefox vote.
Anyway, you guys have done such a good job that I’m going to excuse myself from seeing if IE will wake up after its long slumber.
But if you dispute this post you will flayed alive in the afterthread.
there is no afterthread.
;)
David B, I used FireFox to vote (had to enable the scripting though). Are you running an old version maybe?
No vote total given.
Not this again. Ok, fine.
This statement is just silly.
Ok now that the people who have never been there and done that, so to speak, have had a good time throwing stones at the idea of an after life. I will tell you that there IS one and I know because my mother visited for a while and came back to tell the story. Does it involve religion – she said most definitely NO! In fact she laughed that Christians are going to be so surprised they’d have heart attacks — if they weren’t already dead. LOL
My mother’s heart stopped while she was in the hospital for arthritis. She stated that she hovered near the ceiling watching her body and what the doctors were doing to it and felt sad because that old body was in such bad shape. The head doctor went to the nurse’s desk down the hall. Being the curious sort, she followed him and listened to what he said about her (basically that they had no idea why her heart stopped.) She followed him back to the room. She saw the light and felt the presence of her parents, but when she started to head for it they got her heart going and she was drawn back into her body. She was not happy to be back. In fact, she was really pissed off.
The next day my sister and I visiting her when the doctor came in and she told him what happened. He tried to tell her that it was a lack of oxygen in her brain. She said, “Then how do I know what you told the nurses?” She proceeded to repeat his conversation to him. He looked panicked and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone leave a room so fast. She really scared him. She said she never saw him again and he was the attending.
She said that it is NOT about religion or who you worship. She did not come back talking about God, but about being good to each other. She said that’s the impression she got – not that there will be judgment, but a gentle love and acceptance.
She asked me to tell her story to anyone who would listen so people would know they aren’t going to be judged and risk going to hell. Death is just the start of an incredible adventure and much harder on the ones left behind. My mother was completely sane and lived another three years. She was agnostic and remained one. What she got out of her experience is that she was no longer afraid to die. Thanks to her, neither am I. :)
@ janegael
Please read my handle out loud 50 times. Then go through this thread and apply some of the reasoning contained therin to your story. And stop being so silly.
Ok now that the people who have never been there and done that, so to speak, have had a good time throwing stones at the idea of an after life.
what about NewEnglandBob, who i shall now call BounceBackBob?
I will tell you that there IS one and I know because my mother visited for a while and came back to tell the story.
full stop.
the plural of anecdote is not evidence, etc. etc.
Re John Morales post 165.
I think I’m up to date with Firefox updates, and allowed the page on noscript.
Others above have also complained about not being able to vote using Firefox.
janegael,
Whatever floats your boat; you want to indulge your wishful thinking based on an anecdote, fine.
So you now think death isn’t, un, death, but some sort of transition to a different form of existence, a non-corporeal one.
Woo!
Well, no. According to your claim, she was gnostic about this issue. That’s the opposite of agnostic.
He looked panicked and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone leave a room so fast. She really scared him. She said she never saw him again and he was the attending.
lol no other interpretation for that behavior, eh?
here’s one:
the doctor went to fetch a mental health care professional, better able to deal with delusions brought on by oxygen deprivation?
@Jangael
There are great many centres of research on disability that would love to hear the secret of sight without eyes and hearing without ears, oh… and asserting without proof.
B
janegael, please go back and read Bride of Shrek’s post. Your mother’s hallucination isn’t evidence for anything. A doctor leaving because their patient is rambling incoherently isn’t evidence for anything, either.
What she got out of her experience is that she was no longer afraid to die. Thanks to her, neither am I. :)
strangely enough, i think you will readily find that most of the skeptics, if not all, are similarly unafraid of death.
so, why were you?
Hey janegael,
Your post has two important lesson for us.
1. Human brain can do funny things. In your case, expecting others to buy into implausible claims based on personal anecdotes.
2. Some people are extremely long winded.
Apart from that I am amazed that I am expected to think any of this indicates what comes AFTER death while it turns out, none of these anecdotes come from people coming back from the dead. They were in fact quite alive when they had these experiences.
That doesn’t happen very often.
strange, i’m using firefox and haven’t had problems voting or viewing that page.
what platform?
janegael #168 wrote:
No, you don’t “know.”
There are three groups who should not trust your story. The first group is the people who hear about it on the internet.
The second group is those who hear about it from your mother.
The third group is your mother.
Why? Because there are no controls on an anecdote like this. What happened, and in what order, and under what circumstances, all rest on memory and interpretation. These are notoriously unreliable. Nothing can be checked or cross-checked — other than bare medical facts and records.
This story shouldn’t be trusted — even if everything you said is absolutely true, and there really is an afterlife. It’s not about being right. It’s about being honest, and cautious, and using methods that seriously entertain and rule out alternative possibilities.
If you think your anecdote is going to be more acceptable to us because it says something we like, you really don’t understand where we’re coming from.
But it may hint at where you’re coming from.
NewEnglandBob #57, two times?!? Glad to have you with us still.
She saw the light and felt the presence of her parents, but when she started to head for it they got her heart going and she was drawn back into her body.
so… she never actually even made it to the supposed afterlife…
hmm.
She saw the light
suspicious phrasing here.
what light?
why THE light, instead of “a” light?
My mother scared the shit out of him because she could repeat a conversation he had at the end of a hall a LONG way from her dead body. Obviously he’s heard ND stories before and had a pat answer — until my mother quoted him. He never had that happen before.
I’m long winded because I had a story to tell — not just a few snotty remarks to post.
My question to you is why do you demand that there be nothing after death? There is so much we don’t know about almost everything. Many, if not most of you here claim to be skeptics, but honest skepticism is different than flat denial and harassment of the possibility of something that can’t be “currently” explained.
I was never afraid to die having been pretty much an atheist since I was a pre-teen, but I never thought of it as an adventure before either. Now I do.
I could have mentioned that I’ve had a couple of dogs come back after death and make their presence physically known, but I figured you’d just think I was nuts. I’m not and I’m not rude either. :)
Hmmmmmm…
Why am I not surprised that http://today.msnbc.msn.com would not let me participate in their lousy poll. I run Firefox 3.0.17 on Linux. So, when I click their “submit” button, nothing happens.
Really wanting to participate, I fired up a Win2K virtual machine and voted “NO”. I might do it again in a while too after clearing cookies and LSOs.
how do you know the conversation your mother “heard” actually happened? do you have evidence for the correspondence of what your mother claims she heard and any real conversations that may or may not have been happening?
you’re confused. no one is “demanding” that there should be no afterlife. it’s merely that it’s a proposition that goes against everything we know about humans, their brains, and the mind; and it’s a proposition without any evidence for its existence whatsoever.
Therefore, demanding that we accept that it might exist is the same as demanding we accept that the Easter Bunny might exist.
oh whoop-dee-doo. and I have on several occasions seen the future in my dreams.
We can’t trust our individual experiences, impressions, or memories. If we could, we wouldn’t need science.
janegael:
My question to you is why do you demand that there be nothing after death?
Wrong question. We are not demanding that there is nothing after death, we are saying that evidence does not say that there is. Big difference. And your story is not proof enough of anything. I have an aunt and uncle who swears that they had a haunted house but all they had were stories. You need more.
If the reality of this is up for a vote, I’m voting for an après-vie. I figure Douglas Adams will already be there.
janegael #183 wrote:
You changed your story. You had said
You — and your mother — seem to be filling in the blanks, improving the narrative as it develops.
We’re not “demanding” it. Why would we? We’re being careful in methods — honest skepticism.
The fact that you’re apparently assuming that we’re not accepting your story at face value because we don’t like what it tells us, suggests that this is how you, yourself, operate. The more pleasing the belief, the looser the evidence necessary to persuade you.
It is very easy to look for things that confirm a belief. It is harder to force yourself to look for what would disconfirm it. For us, it would take much stronger, more reliable evidence.
What would change your mind, about the afterlife? If you’re wrong, how would you know?
That’s honest skepticism.
Janegael
I call BS on your story. “Head” doctors don’t just leave during a patient’s cardiac arrest and wander down the hall to blithely have a chat to the nurses about it… and for fuck’s sake your mother recalls him saying to a nurse he didn’t know why a heart stopped? Bullshit, because a) a “head” doctor would never say that to a desk nurse and b)your mother’s own NDE diagnosis is that her body was “old and in such bad shape”- well, frickin clue there on why it stopped but by your story apparently the doctor didn’t?.
You, I and any member of the medical profession know both know you’re lying here.
Poor Wandering One
Thanks for your kind words but I’m not a nurse anymore. I caved into my inner evil one and went to the dark side of the force and became a lawyer. I now leave the good works in life to Rorschach and the other doctors and nurses here!
On my last remaining vestige of humanity though I promise I have never, and would never, do medical negligence cases!
Janegael:
Janegael, you must be new to these parts. You see, because of a lack of evidence, your story is no more believable than someone with claims of seeing a reanimated Elvis… riding a unicycle… with Bigfoot.
Stories of the dead rising are fine for the campfire, but around here, evidence is what we crave.
Why would that scare anyone???
I don’t get it.
“Story”?
If it’s true, and at all testable, you have a paper to publish. No, actually, if it’s true, it’s very, very strange that that “scared” doctor didn’t publish it long ago.
My mother scared the shit out of him because she could repeat a conversation he had at the end of a hall a LONG way from her dead body.
conclusion not based on evidence.
did he confirm that your mother was correct?
did he confirm that there was no way your mother could have otherwise overheard the relevant conversation?
you say nothing of these things.
ergo, you have provided no evidence whatsoever that my interpretation is any less credible than yours.
I was never afraid to die having been pretty much an atheist since I was a pre-teen, but I never thought of it as an adventure before either. Now I do.
*ahem*:
at which point were you lying then?
Very sci-fi. Canopic, honey, marmalade, leyden … or merely unattractively decorated or unsterilised after the previous occupant.
Would this be a good time to bring up e-prime? (not a TV show) A goodly amount of these semantic quibbles vanish under this regimen.
BS
My question to you is why do you demand that there be nothing after death?
I’d say that’s projection on your part.
why do you demand we believe your story without any corroborating evidence?
36.2% yes.
58.2% no.
I’m glad there is no life after death. I’d hate to be laying there in a dead body rotting away and aware of it. Yuck.
So, will the afterlife be like Heaven or Las Vegas?
Gosh, janegael, I would be scared if someone came to me convinced s/he was abducted by aliens too.
Now that’s a funny stroy that your mom heard all those things when she wasn’t even in the room. But since I wasn’t there, there are some more mundane explanations that I have to consider, like someone on the hospital staff telling her? Can we repeat the experiment under controlled conditions to see if the results hold up?
Now here is my question for you: are you sure the Islamic paradise doesn’t exist? Given there is so much we don’t know and that there are reports of Muslims who have had near death experiences with it, should we consider the possibility that suicide bombers are actually getting the harems of virgins we hear about?
(And the pagan Valhalla. And the native American happy hunting ground. The list goes on and on).
Where in your story is there an indication that LAD is an adventure?, Your mother’s alleged adventure constituted hanging out in a hospital, seeing the obligatory light, feeling the presence of her parents, and eavesdropping on a doctor’s alleged conversation. Not very exciting. In fact, it all sounds rather mundane if you think about it.
Your assertion that life after death is an adventure, seems hyperbolic when compared to your actual description of the alleged events. Is it not possible then, that you’re reading more into this part of the story than is actually there? Could it be, that your assertion of an adventure is more a reflection of your own wishful thinking? If so, what other parts of your story might be exaggerated or enhanced?
Patricia, I think there is a Greek myth about that, only the person has eternal life but does not stop aging.
This guy claims to have evidence of life after death, based on claims about near-death experiences (NDEs)
Uh, that would be life after near-death, which is rather uncontroversial.
Yeah yeah, anecdotes aren’t proof
and so on. In honesty cyberspace isn’t the best place to present this kind of proof anyway.
Enough of that. Guys what kind of form would the evidence take for the existence of a soul/afterlife do you think? What would shift a skeptic beyond thinking this just being relayed personal experiences of hallucinations?
B
When I was trying to research them on the Internet, the very first link that popped up was one scattered with loads of links bringing me to the conclusion of the magic sky pixie.
A much more reliable website is iands.org, which attempts to provide NDE victims all the information and contacts they need. I found this article insightful:
http://www.iands.org/nde_index/ndes/key_facts_about_near-death_experiences.html
The only slightly shady part is that they appear to take a rather uncritical position towards stories where victims have reportedly been able to make downright impossible observations during out-of-body experiences. This is no surprise as most of them are based on personal accounts, but there is even some research referenced on the topic. Given their rather matter-of-factness approach I’m guessing they may have decided not to alienate visiting victims by throwing their experiences out of the window as hogwash.
This is a better read for those fearing afterlife:
http://www.iands.org/distressing.html
Not surprisingly, whether the NDE is nice or distressing is rather likely to be dependent on circumstance than on your karma.
My life will continue after my death but not in any ridiculous nefarious spiritual form. It will continue in the (hopefully) good legacy I have left in instilling values and ethics in my children. My life will continue to be remembered, increasingly less often, for maybe a generation, possibly two, and then I will cease to exist in anyone’s memory and will only continue on paper record. It will also, in some form or another, continue to be present in my genetic material, which I have been a conduit of from my ancestors that predeceased me and onto those generations in the future, should my progeny reproduce.
My catholic grandmother finds this aspect of my atheism hardest to grasp. She is devestated by the fact I do not believe I will go on in any spiritual form and she continually asks how i can live with this fact. My position is that I am comforted by this knowledge. I know my only legacy is my deeds so I strive to improve myself and be a good person so these deeds are worthwhile.
I am good in this life, not because it will gain me entry into heaven, but because it is my responsibility to be so. I am good because I only get one shot at all of this and unlike the religos, I can’t fuck it up and say sorry for absoution . I am good becasue my internal moral compass tells me it is the best way to be happy, make others happy and enjoy life, not because an external imaginary god tells me I have to be.
Janegael’s second hand story is a rather ordinary and common one, one of many of it’s sort, just as stories of alien abductions are. To think that it shows that there is an afterlife requires numerous levels of stupidity and gullibility.
*picks jaw up off floor* Janine, that story was also in a really old book I used to own called The Witch of Prague.
Patricia, Q of S’s
..oh honey, I turned 40 last week. I think this may be happening to me already.
yp. Eos fell in love with some Trojan pretty boy, kidnapped him so he could be her boy-toy, and asked Zeus to give him eternal life; but she forgot to ask for eternal youth for him, so he continued aging and shriveling and became completely immobile and senile.
not a fun way to spend eternity.
Janegael–You say your mother ‘visited’ the afterlife, but according to your story the only place she visited was the nurse’s desk. How does she know there’s no judgment, only acceptance after you ‘go into the light’, if she didn’t go there?
My question to you is why do you demand that there be nothing after death?
For the same reason that I “demand” that phantom limbs can’t run.
Jadehawk @ #210
Which proves, yet again, all gods are pricks.
..oh honey, I turned 40 last week. I think this may be happening to me already.
lol.
I sure hope not… (45)
40 *smirk* wait till you hit the middle of 50.
Bride, you just turned 40? Wait till your back gives out on you. Up to that point, I took the ability to walk or even roll over in bed for granted.
‘raspberry’
How does she know there’s no judgment
Why are we even asking Jane, who is merely relating someone else’s story, how that person can know this or that? Jane says “I will tell you that there IS one and I know because my mother visited for a while and came back to tell the story” — this is no better than “I will tell you there IS a god because the bible says so”.
I could have mentioned that I’ve had a couple of dogs come back after death and make their presence physically known, but I figured you’d just think I was nuts.
Not nuts, just grossly stupid.
But Ichy you still have the most beautiful rows of teeth.
Bribase, have you ever heard of a prosecutor asking the accused how he should prove his guilt? Afterlife/soul is a claim you are making. It is your job to come up with eviidence for that, not ours.
But since you are insisting, here is a suggestion: why don’t you start by looking for neurons whose membrane potentials are controlled by unseen, immeasurable powers rather than electrochemical gradients. After all if soul exists, it has to somehow interact with brain cells.
I’m not rude either.
Actually you are, by trolling this thread and wasting people’s time with your idiocy.
What would shift a skeptic beyond thinking this just being relayed personal experiences of hallucinations?
any form of repeatable independent confirmation of any of the things represented as “visions” by NDE’s under controlled conditions would be a start.
never seen that, ever.
example from the above:
prove that:
1. mother overheard and repeated said conversation word for word, and this was confirmed by those present who independently heard the same conversation.
2. that there was no other way possible for the mother to have overhead this conversation, other than being out of the room. This would entail the two in conversation being in a location she could, measurably, have no way to see or hear.
strangely, like the “talk to the dead” folks, when put under scrutiny like that, it never fails to.. uh.. fail.
these are NOT extraordinary requests, btw.
Come, come! Should we elders be sharking on the youngsters?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA1
(I so love diabolical laughter.)
Bribase #204 wrote:
Better controlled studies. Much better than given in the article.
It would also help if we had good, solid evidence for some sort of mind-brain duality — positive experiments with ESP, say, which were replicable, and stood up under expert scrutiny.
What we do have are marginal effects which seem to go away when flaws in the experiments are corrected. This, despite dozens of years of attempts. We also have a mounting body of evidence for human errors in memory and subjective evaluations. Coupled with the strong support for mind-brain dependency and the neurological explanations for transcendent experiences such as NDE’s and OBE’s, the case for life after death is so weak, it’s negligible.
But I can conceive of it being a strong case. That’s just not what we have.
And on the thread connected to the linked story there’s a guy who is convinced of life after death because of what a medium tells him.
Cold reading is impossible, of course.
Other possibilities exist, like perhaps she did indeed hear what the doctor said.
As for the conversation “far away” (what does that mean?), what was it about? More importantly, most people can’t remember anything but the gist of their conversation, with memories being stronger but worse during stressful conditions. I can believe that your mom got close enough to what was being discussed to discomfort some people, but we have no reliable record of what was said, and neither do the people who had the discussion have a good one.
Honestly, the problems that we now know with respect to eyewitnesses make these sorts of anecdotes even less believable than beforehand. It’s easy to spook a number of people with a cold reading (intentional or otherwise), and the lack of good eyewitness observation and memory leaves these stories meaningless in an evidentiary sense.
Why do mediums convince people in their chosen sets and settings, without being statistically convincing under controlled circumstances? Why are NDEs, which are almost inevitably uncontrolled sets and settings, supposed to convince us just because of equally uncontrolled experiences of emotionally-stressed individuals?
We don’t enjoy throwing stones at claims of an afterlife, which I’m sure we’d rather like to discover had solid support. We throw stones at unverifiable fantastic claims that people like you obviously are only too eager to believe, because we’ve chosen to accept claims that can only be decently supported. Yours is not.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
i would suggest those thinking about this kind of stuff visit Randi’s site, and for an intro, just check out the requirements to win the big prize:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge/challenge-application.html
are any of those extraordinary requests?
nope.
has ANYONE even been able to meet the simple rules laid down there?
nope.
if there is a million dollars at stake, one wonders that if janegael was so sure of this claim, they haven’t applied for it?
please don’t. It’s bad enough that a friend of mine informed me that menopause made her brain go to mush to the point where everything is a “thingie” now. Considering how mushy my brain is in its natural state, I don’t want to think about what it’ll turn into. :-/
But Ichy you still have the most beautiful rows of teeth.
:))))
Guys what kind of form would the evidence take for the existence of a soul/afterlife do you think?
How about you telling us what sort of evidence you think should serve, and why?
What would shift a skeptic beyond thinking this just being relayed personal experiences of hallucinations?
It depends on how gullible the skeptic is.
And afterlife is an incoherent concept, like phantom limbs running.
Jadehawk
It’s not really my brain I’m worried about, it’s my body.
I swear I woke up on the morning of my 40th and my boobs were two inches or so closer to the ground. Mind you, I had a monumental hangover so everything looked pretty grim at that point.
Bride, I would be wondering what it is was you were doing with your boobs the night before.
this is no better than “I will tell you there IS a god because the bible says so”.
that sums it up.
It would also help if we had good, solid evidence for some sort of mind-brain duality — positive experiments with ESP, say, which were replicable, and stood up under expert scrutiny.
What we have is good solid evidence, as well as metaphysics, for mind-brain identity. People seeking the alternative should grow up.
Brisbase:
The same kind of evidence you’d want to see before plunking your money down for a used car. If someone showed you an underexposed photo of a fuzzy blob on a black background, you probably wouldn’t accept that as sufficient evidence for the existence of the car. Likewise, you would probably find a verbal assertion from someones, uncle’s mother’s cousin’s mailman insufficient as well.
You’d want to actually experience it with your senses right? You’d want to touch it, look under the hood, give it a test drive, examine the history, right? And if you weren’t able to do this yourself, you’d want a reliable proxy to do it for you. In other words, you’d want actual documented, detectable, testable, measurable and repeatable evidence for the existence of the car.
It’s the same for the afterlife.
Bride, I would be wondering what it is was you were doing with your boobs the night before.
re-enacting a scene from “Return of a Man called Horse”?
If you seriously want to learn about after life experiences try looking up the work of Dr. V. S. Ramachandran. He has published work, and some lectures posted on YouTube that can explain to your mom in easy (sometimes) terms what was happening to her.
Perhaps you should look at his work first if your mom is the type to have breakdowns when religious myths are debunked.
We don’t enjoy throwing stones at claims of an afterlife, which I’m sure we’d rather like to discover had solid support.
Speak for yourself. I would not rather like to discover that P and not P — it would cause me considerable upset.
@234 – Eeewww!
(Yes, you win the 1st creeped out the girls on the thread.)
see now, this kind of stuff is at least theoretically fixable(if the funds and desire to get it fixed are there). there’s nothing I can do about brain-mush.
any form of repeatable independent confirmation of any of the things represented as “visions” by NDE’s under controlled conditions would be a start.
Why do people here, from PZ on down, conflate NDEs with an afterlife? Even if someone declared brain-dead later woke up, claimed that “they” had floated off to the NSA and were able to accurately describe its innermost secrets, that still would not establish the existence of an afterlife, it would merely make it more plausible on the grounds that disembodied persons (whatever the fuck that can even mean) appear possible (if something utterly incoherent can be possible).
If we’re polling concerning the existence of an afterlife- do we use a divining rod?
/”runs and hides far far away.”
Why do people here, from PZ on down, conflate NDEs with an afterlife?
It’s the idea of dis-corporeal sensation, not so much whether there is even an “afterlife” or not.
How about if they all came back with the same sort of account, rather than cultural expectations heavily coloring the stories? Let’s say that some distinctive and unexpected individual or object shows up in every NDE (including among those who, so far as can be determined, have never heard of such a being or object), rather than, gee, we see the people who have died, our surroundings, and cultural expectations.
Or hey, why not reanimate a truly dead body, one that has suffered irreversible damages to the extent that life as we know it is impossible in that body? Should be a piece of cake for the supernatural, something that can support complex knowledge without obeying physics at all.
Or actually, the point is not to make us believe hopelessly flawed stories from NDEs. The fact is that we don’t know what the evidence would be for a “true afterlife” because such a phenomenon is unknown. It’s like asking what would convince us that an ID with “Designer” whose purposes and means are completely unknown to us is in fact true. Well, nothing that we can think of, because you just ruled out meaningful evidence for such an ID.
Violate physics in some important matter involving death, in a manner that can be repeatedly observed, and you might have a shot. Give us a bunch of culturally-differing stories of an “afterlife,” though, with a hit-or-miss existence of NDEs appearing among those who are actually near death (why do so many near death never experience any NDE phenomena, if it’s really telling us of what is beyond death?), and no verifiable evidence, and you merely have a phenomenon that we don’t understand well and which appears to come from stressed brains.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Insightful Ape
Don’t get me wrong on this one, of course the burden is squarely on the person asserting the claim. But in the same was as people invoking ‘rabbit fossils in the precambrian’ or evidence of foresight in adaptation to be a possible means of disproof of evolution, it’s always an interesting exercise to think about how an afterlife could be confirmed.
There’s no doubt that it’s perfectly okay to dismiss the assertion out of hand when there’s no evidence but I like to think that it’s a measure of a strong position to be able to consider if the evidence was entirely different what a strong case would look like.
B
How about if they all came back with the same sort of account, rather than cultural expectations heavily coloring the stories?
nope. could still be interpreted as similar brain chemistry producing similar results.
Mothra – one extra turn at the spanking couch.
Here is a poll for the “jesus gunsights” that have been in the news…
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/01/19/2010-01-19_firm_takes_flak_for_rifle_scopes_with_bible_verse.html
Bribase,
See my #186. Others have made the point, too, truth machine in particular.
Why seek evidence for an incoherent concept’s reality?
it’s always an interesting exercise to think about how an afterlife could be confirmed.
are you abandoning your very different, but same time requested examination of evidence for a soul?
…and yes, it’s rather like proposing a thought experiment on what would be required evidence supporting the notion that unicorns actually exist.
I have to say, in thinking about it, that the only reason many of us even consider formulating a serious answer to that question to begin with is pure conditioning based on repeated exposure over the years to anecdotes just like Jane’s.
makes us somehow more inclined to think that postulating the evidence for an “afterlife” or “soul” is any better than doing the same for unicorns or santa claus.
John Morales has no one told you co-ed snipe hunting is fun? *innocent look*
It’s well-known that ghosts walk through walls, yet don’t sink into the ground. :)
The spanking couch? but I thought, Brownian. . .
Well, you are quite right, Bribase. But I did give you one example of where you might start looking if you are a serious investigator and you think “souls” maybe real.
Here is something else though: evidence from multiple sources (from neurophysiology to imaging) suggests that what we think of as “free will” is just an illusion-meaning that “our” actions are basically a function of brain’s circuits and self attribution (aka “agency”) is a secondary phenomenon that can be subject to manipulation. (Google a book by the name “volitional brain” if interested). To be blunt about it, “soul” is a hypothesis that is already discarded by neuroscientists.
[OT]
Patricia, heh.
I think I may have a touch of Aspie’s, and this may account for my serious dislike of practical jokes (particularly of that variety), whether upon myself or others.
I see what you mean John, there are claims about gnomes, goblins, dragons et al that are way more coherent than a dead, alive person or alive, dead person.
Ichthyic I don’t follow you
I wasn’t requesting an examination beyond an idle thought experiment.
B
In his latter years Robert Heinlein in his book ‘Expanding Universe’ made the quip that he expected proof of an afterlife and ESP to be found within the next 10 years (I read the book sometime around 1980). Now we know why he was an SF writer, while Isaac Asimov was (also) a science writer.
Oddly enough, Firefox on WinXP exhibited the same behavior as your Linux machine, but Firefix 3.5.5 on my Linux machine worked without a hitch.
truth machine OM #39 wrote:
As you point out, if the possibility or even existence of “disembodied persons” are confirmed through good evidence that NDE’s involve mind-out-of-body, this makes an afterlife more plausible, and the stories themselves less far-fetched. Mind-brain dependency (or identity) is a huge hurtle for their hypothesis to overcome.
I’d almost swear that I went on. Maybe like this:
I mean like the “evil Spock” being seen in NDEs without there ever having been a Star Trek and ideas of Vulcans–or anything similar to them. Or an Eiffel tower, again, prior to anything like that existing. I would like accidental characteristics as well, like a scar or mole in some very specific spot (below an eyebrow the same place every time, for instance).
That is to say, sameness/similarity do convince us. Similar brain chemistry would not explain (not yet, at least) the particulars of the same object or entity that everyone sees during NDEs without even hearing about it from anybody else previously (that would be tough to establish, perhaps not even possible under today’s conditions (unethical experiments might do it, however)).
Of course I didn’t leave it at what you quoted. And if nothing were allowed as possible evidence, even the same accidental characteristics on a non-iconic face, one arguably is too strenuous in demands for evidence–at least that something beyond what is known is in play.
Exactly what an evidently paranormal NDE would mean would still be in question, however. The apparent meeting of “dead” relatives in the “beyond” would lead one to suppose that one is going to an “afterlife,” however those appearances could well be misleading (is the supernatural governed by honest “laws” or “entities”?).
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
For a skeptical look at NDE’s try Susan Blackmore.
Mothra – well certainly you can meet Brownian at the spanking couch…. go right ahead. I suppose you’ll ask him to wear his fedora too!
Of course there is an afterlife. God promised us that we’ll still have paradise even though we got kicked out of the garden of Eden by our own failings. Satan tries to pull us into hell by planting seeds of denial, but we must remember that this is a sin and the wages of sine is death.
God Bless You. :)
And wear period clothing.
BS
Of course John, I’ve read a fair amount about free will vs Determinism. And of course there is a wealth of evidence such as Brain injury that shows a change or decline in faculties with no explanation as to how you get your memories back after you lose the whole thing.
On the apologist side, is there any speaker that tries to square the argument from
dain bramage?
Did the label on the jar refer to “Abby Normal”?
@ex- rebel I’m rich, I’m rich, bwahahahaha.
‘No’ at 56.4% when I did my part for the inconvenience sample.
Whoa, dude, that’s some harsh trigonometry.
Because they are both supposedly based on the same thing: the incorporeal soul. The same dualistic logic that allows someone to assume the existence of an afterlife is indistinguishable from the logic of NDEs.
Those who use claims of NDE to bolster their view of an afterlife vis-a-vis a soul have exactly the same ontological standing as those who merely claim an afterlife with their Heavenly Father.
And, NDEs present testable claims, unlike an afterlife, or reincarnation.
I missed something with PZ and the NDE’s. Or perhaps my brain has slipped further than Jadehawks. (No, don’t post the first three things you just thought. Thanks)
The afterlife is a tangential issue to this.
Having the seeds of denial planted in you isn’t such a bad experiance. *smirk*
God Bless You. :)
…right up the ass. :)
Bribase,
Sure. The conceit is the brain is a receiver/mind-body interface for the soul, hence damage to it damages the soul’s bodily expression.
Similarly, OOB/NDE experiences are purportedly evidence that the soul can be separated from the body — in the former case, by intention, in the latter case, by necessity.
I’d almost swear that I went on. Maybe like this:
yes, i blame codeine for short attention span.
I wasn’t requesting an examination beyond an idle thought experiment.
the point being that it is no more worthy a thought experiment than debating the existence of unicorns.
or am i just repeating myself now?
God bless you :)
He sure the fuck hasn’t yet.
Then what in the name of Mullos are you doing here?
Yeah, cos we all need to start approaching this from a new angle.
I didn’t sneeze.
Is the argument for affine time after death contained in an examination of the theta wave state? Can our millions of hurts be smoothed away by 4-7 Mhz? Most importantly, is death an epic morphism between this domain and the co-domain of God?
Come, come! Should we elders be sharking on the youngsters?
Only if you infants dare! /maniacal cackling
Where do I cosine? Not that I’m trying to integrate into this group or anything. Nor would I want to cross you.
Thank you, thank you. Don’t forget to tip your waitstaff.
When I was 15 years old I was on my way home. I was about 100 meters from there when I passed three guys. One of them called my name and the last thing that I can remember is seeing a hand in front of my face and my head being pushed into a wall.
From this point on I have no memories so I will have to relate the narrative as it was given to me by my mother.
She heard a banging at the door and when she opened I was standing there and she saw a trail of blood behind me. I fell forward, and she dragged me down to the car and drove me to hospital.
Approximately 10 minutes after she got me there, my heart stopped and they had to resuscitate me. So technically I fulfilled one of the criteria of being considered dead.
At NO TIME did I have anything resembling an OOB experience. I was in a coma and the next thing I knew I woke up in a hospital bed (a couple of days later) and there was a priest next to it.
I freaked out and told him to in no uncertain terms to bugger off and that I was not going to be grist for his mill.
I did him a bit of an injustice though, because my mother was a Roman Catholic and she asked him to spend time with me, even though I was not, and nor was she, a member of his flock. Now although my mother was not a strong believer, in that time of crisis she told me that her asking the priest to pray for me “couldn’t hurt”.
So from my own experience of being dead I can definitively say that OOB or NDE is bullshit.
ex-rebel wrote:
If Satan exists and his goal is to trick humanity into doing the wrong thing, how do you know the bible isn’t his work and not your god’s?
Nigel – The only crossing we do here is on hot buns.
There’s no angle there; time to cosine this arc towards something more cosecant.
So from my own experience of being dead I can definitively say that OOB or NDE is bullshit.
ah! see, but you were knocked in the head before you had the heart attack.. so, um, you weren’t conscious of the time you were OOB!
yeah, that’s the ticket!
Ex-rebel, ex-rebel
You tore your dress
Ex-rebel, ex-rebel
Your face is a mess
So what are the wages of cosine?
I’ve died 3 times, once as an infant and twice later. Only the drowning produced a “white light/tunnel” effect, just as lack of oxygen always does. Religitards need to realise that nature and it’s effects are always measurable and decipherable. stop stepping near science and it will stop kicking your collective ass.
Wait a minute, you may have discovered the truth at last! A large part of humanity is always doing the wrong thing. Oh dear, a Monty Python moment.
Why, you tart!
How dare you try to butter me up Sir!
I note there is an afterbun, but it’d be in bad taste to link to an image of such. :)
White light!
Why John, you are the flour of chivalry.
The afterlife, though, I can link to.
Let
W(sine(t)) = D for all t. Then since sine(t) = cosine(t + pi/2) and W(sine(t)) does not depend on t, W(cosine(t)) = D for all t.
Ergo, the wages of cosine are also death.
Clarification to 298: (The above figure of pi/2 depends on t being stated in radiance. If it’s a matter of degrees, you’ll have to make the right turn instead.)
Miki,
A shining clarification!
Oh MikiZ
You are SUCH a nerd! If you’re a woman I’m impressed, if you’re a man I’m impressed and I think you’re sexy.
Shining clarification – huzzah, HOT butter.
I know Bride, that French,
makes my bosom heave too. *Pffft*
If the wages of sine is death, then is the wages of arcsine life? Or have I completely forgoten basic trigonometry?
I just voted
Current results:
38.5% Yes
55.6% No
6% Unsure
Again, people looking for the “miraculous” or “godly” answer instead of appreciating the real life amazing thing that is happening.
The brain is an amazing organ full of chemicals. When there is a trauma to the body or the brain, masses of chemicals can be released. Why can’t people just accept that this is what a NDE is?
Its just the bodies natural chemicals being released. Look and find out what is really happening in the brain. Stop attributing it to “god”.
My tollerance of relgious explainations and people accepting these explainations has totally disappeared. I used to be able to go “meh, think what you like”. But now it just infuriates me and I have to arc up and have a discussion about it.
The range of sin-1 is typically defined as [-pi/2, pi/2], which is a subset of [-1,1] the range of sine. As such, the wages of arcsine? Also Death. Christianity is true because it’s simple, see?
Of course, sine is not an injective function R->R, so you could choose a different cut for arcsine, in which case you’d have to extend W to W: R->C (where W is wages, R is a real number and C is consequence), since it is presently only defined on [-1,1] -> C. I think this will account for Hinduism.
Are we sure that isn’t supposed to be radians, or are we actually talking W/sr/m2?
#288
Ichthyic,
well either OOB and NDE are something that is real and let’s face it, if one can “see” something then what would one see something with – for that matter what would one interpret that which is “seen” with – it certainly could not involve the brain.
Thus by the reasoning of the proponents of the afterlife, OOB or NDE there MUST be something else outside of my own corporeal existence. So if there were such a thing I would of the “logic” involved be aware even if I were not conscious.
I have been “dead” and there was a grand total of bupkis, nada, zilch – neither a “light” nor an excessive feeling of heat.
Thus I must conclude that if some form of corporeal “consciousness” is required to experience such things then they are indistinguishable from a normal dream state – it might appear real but it is nothing other than a figment.
Sooo… the lead example in that story is someone who was convinced that they felt themselves floating above their own body… I’ve had the same experience. Of course, I was so high there were probably sattelites below me, but hey, what’s the difference? They were subject to their brain chemicals, I added one more.
F@307:
In secular terms, yes, it would be radians. When God enters the picture, it’s all radiance. Dimensional analysis is a godless pursuit.
This IS the afterlife. Sucks, don’t it?
Oops, spoke too soon at 306. I usually know that pi/2 > 1. So, the most that can be said is that the wages of arcsine are usually death. Otherwise, you need to extend W.
If you want to see god or aliens just smoke some DMT (Dimethyltryptamine)
Nate
Is there an afterlife?
Yes: It’s sometimes referred to as death.
Perhaps we should be asking: Is there an after-death? I think:
Yes: it’s usually referred to as history: some people just seem to play a bigger role in the after-death than others do!
Yes. 38.7% 6,712 votes
No. 55.3% 9,602 votes
I’m not sure. 6% 1,050 votes
I read several books about out of body stuff about a hundred years ago. Or maybe it was twenty five years ago. One I think I remember is: Beyond the Body by Susan Blackmore. No woo as I recall.
Nate
This site will not let me vote. Aghast! Must be the spirits that roam about in the netherworld hexing me.
I know for a fact that there will be life after death. When I die I will become an entire ecosystem!
nathanschroeder1,
Check out Susan J. Blackmore’s statement at http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/NS2000.html
It references a book I haven’t read detailing other former parapsychologists experiences.
I know for a fact that there will be life after death. When I die I will become an entire ecosystem!
You already are an ecosystem.
Somebody cosh that ‘comedian’. It should be a sinh.
In that case, I’ll have the cake.
Intuition says it should be a sinh, but it’s surprisingly hard to keep a Good man down, whether or not you give them a choice.*
*Yes, I feel bad. It’s a compulsion, and my wife normally bears the brunt of it, but she’s busy.
oh honey, I turned 40 last week. I think this may be happening to me already.
:::And more responses about the perils of aging.:::
I’ll be 48 in a couple of weeks, but I can tell you now, I’ll take a few aches and pains here and there over being 25, any day. What an awful age, unless of course it comes in a package like this.
The more I age, the more of a lech I become. It’s great. :)
re 284:
Well, clearly, as an atheist you were denied entry into the afterlife. /sarcasm
I can believe that your mom got close enough to what was being discussed to discomfort some people
There are a lot of possibilities for his “fear” or discomfort. How does she know it was fear? Is she familiar with this guy’s reactions? Even if it was fear, how does she know it related to her mother? In a hospital? Is she fucking kidding? There could have been a million things that would cause him to panic unexpectedly–forgetting to relay the need to increase or reduce a dosage, forgetting to check on a particularly ill patient, forgetting something valuable…
The discomfort could also come from the mom overhearing at some point the doctor say something he wasn’t supposed to be saying. Medical professionals are human, and they do things like gossip about other patients when they think they’re not being overheard, flirt with people they’re not married to, and so forth.
And those are the possibilities I could think of, off the top of my heat. Bizarre as they are, they all make more sense than an NDE.
Aquaria – I agree, I hope never to be 25 again. That shit hurts.
On the other hand, your example looks like a kid to me, so I am going to stump off to bed…and be a lech too. Which ruins my image of Sam Elliot inviting all ladies for mustache rides. *sigh*
One of the times my wife had surgery, the doctor sent a nurse running out to see me (in a more egalitarian hospital, perhaps the doctor runs?) because she had woken up in the middle of surgery and started ‘babbling’. Once we established that she was speaking a mix of French and Japanese, they gave her more anesthesia and finished the surgery. Doctors are rightly concerned when their patients wake up and act in bizarre ways.
There was a wonderful and brilliant line that Kevin Costner had in Bull Durham: “How come in former lifetimes, everybody is someone famous? How come nobody ever says they were Joe Schmo?”
This makes me wonder: Why don’t these NDE claims about the light and the people they see ever talk about seeing people barely known, or, better yet, despised? Why is it always the people they liked? What about the people who liked them that they were indifferent to? Why is it all about THEM at that time?
Humans can be such selfish creatures, even in death.
n the other hand, your example looks like a kid to me
At 26, he’s completely, gloriously legal, thank the FSM.
I didn’t respond to this poll because I simply don’t care what happens after death. Really, it’s just very morbid and pointless and useless. I’d rather just enjoy life.
hmmm…. has there ever been reports of people going to “hell”? it seems these sort of experiences always talk about the afterlife as kind of nice and soothing.
After all if soul exists, it has to somehow interact with brain cells.
Higgs Boson! Or maybe those mutant neutrinos from the John Cusack disaster movie.
Well it could be …
Jadehawk, hellish NDE.
Very pretty. Who is she?
;o)
hmmm…. has there ever been reports of people going to “hell”? it seems these sort of experiences always talk about the afterlife as kind of nice and soothing
Oh absolutely! Those are the funnest of the fun. You can pack a church to the rafters and beyond with I-went-to-hell-but-jesus-just-wanted-to-give-me-a-taste-so-I-could-warn-others tales.
I always wonder, why not give everyone a taste? Wouldn’t that do the job? Why just this used car salesman with the big hair? Plus, isn’t it a little unfair? This douche gets it firsthand, but I, poor schmuck, have to rely on 2nd, 3rd or 7th hand anecdote?
Ditto for the resurrection by the way.
Good question, Jadehawk. Here’s what could be going on (WAG–Wild Ass Guess):
Hell is associated with heat and heaven the perfect temperature. When you’re dying, your body starts shutting down–cooling off, in essence. Maybe the reason they don’t see hell is because they don’t feel heat.
Just one possibility.
Of course, something just occurred to me: I’m one of those weirdos who loves the cold. My ideal weather temp is around 62-65. I’ve been known to bitch about 68 degree days. My husband? He likes it warm. 75-78 or so. That’s well on the way to unbearable for me (Yeah, how do I survive South Texas in the summer??? AC AC AC, and lots of it!).
We can’t be the only ones who have this disparate a fave temp range.
So how the heck is heaven gonna provide the perfect temp to everyone? Yeah, yeah, I know. He can do anything. Right.
Even if he exists and gathers up billions of groupies to kiss his ass forever like he wants, he’s still gonna have to do magic tricks to give everyone the illusion of perfection.
As you point out, if the possibility or even existence of “disembodied persons” are confirmed through good evidence that NDE’s involve mind-out-of-body, this makes an afterlife more plausible, and the stories themselves less far-fetched. Mind-brain dependency (or identity) is a huge hurtle for their hypothesis to overcome.
Since I pointed it out, what’s the point of repeating it back to me? That’s rather obnoxious.
Again, my comment was about conflating two different things. NDEs involve reports by living breathing awake people about experiences they supposedly had when “near death” (but they weren’t dead; what’s with people here saying they were dead, or died three times — do they really not know the definition of the word?). Since we have no idea how people could have accurate perceptions of external events in the absence of apparent brain activity, we can posit all sorts of ways that could happen that would not be possible once their bodies/brains have actually been destroyed … so while evidence of NDEs could make an afterlife more plausible, it couldn’t establish its existence. Consider Janegael’s full-of-stupid story about her mother. She allegedly had an OOB experience where she “followed” (what moves when there’s no body?) a doctor to a nurse’s desk and “overheard” (with what?) a conversation … ok, but no afterlife. No, that’s a different thing in the story, where she “saw” (with what?) “the light” and “felt the presence” (just what sense is involved here?) of her parents (how do disembodied persons even have a presence?) We recognize this as “the afterlife” because it has distinctive familiar elements of a specific mythology.
The point is that we are dealing with two, perhaps similar, perhaps overlapping, but different ideas, and it’s not just sloppy to conflate them, but it plays into the hands of the proponents of an afterlife, because NDEs — that is, reports of experiences by people who were “near death” or declared “dead” (but never did die) are real phenomena worthy of empirical explanation.
Cough: I highly doubt that the helmet headed barker has really had his NDE. It’s funny how so many of them claim to have been near death, but you have to wonder when it happened. I mean, when you live next to them, you don’t see the wife getting all hysterical about fat-ass dying, or croaking on his Aqua Net fumes. Not much evidence that they’ve been admitted to a hospital, had a surgery, been sick, nothing.
Some of them will tell you all about their “visions” and “prophecies,” too.
IOW: It’s probably all in their heads.
hey supposedly had when “near death” (but they weren’t dead; what’s with people here saying they were dead, or died three times — do they really not know the definition of the word?)
To be fair, TM, it may be equally valid to ask the people making the claim if they’re clear about what NDE means, too.
From the claims the “saw the light” types make, it’s not always clear they think they’re technically alive at the time. Few testimonials claim that the subject was still alive. More often, claimants seem to be saying they were in some bizarro alternative universe between life and death. And some of them outright or implicitly declare that they die and come back, a resurrection like Jesus. I’m not sure if the latter is the majority view, but it’s often the one I see and hear most often from people and in the media.
They’re all over the place with their understanding of the term.
It is beyond doubt that this NDE & OOB phenomenon is and has been a meme supported, and in some cases generated, by the religiously incompetent.
I think it fair to point out that there is very few, if any, ecclesiastical paddlers that would dismiss such a wonderful opportunity to claim it as indisputable fact and therefore proof of a divine lurker behind the veil of consciousness.
It so shoe horns into their collective delusion that they cannot help themselves but claim a divine presence or indeed a spiritual element to human existence…ergo dog!
After all being for the most part evidentially challenged in their fairy story, any vague and illusionary concept exacerbated by severe trauma will find good use in the vague and illusionary concepts they promote.
That the balance in brain chemistry due to unusual and challenging physiological conditions might have a tad to do with such neurone activity, never enters their empty desperate minds.
To be fair, TM, it may be equally valid to ask the people making the claim if they’re clear about what NDE means, too.
But I’m referring to scientific-minded skeptics, as in #284, where we find “So from my own experience of being dead I can definitively say that OOB or NDE is bullshit”, and #290, with “I’ve died 3 times, once as an infant and twice later. Only the drowning produced a “white light/tunnel” effect, just as lack of oxygen always does.”
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/die:
to cease to live; undergo the complete and permanent cessation of all vital functions; become dead.
But I wasn’t talking about the people talking about being dead. I’m only trying to point out that while this side is indeed confusing the issue, the other is laying claim to NDE in a way that it isn’t defined as well. That’s it. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Or, let’s put it this way, the popular claims about NDEs aren’t matching up with what NDEs are, by definition.
Aquaria @344,
Agreed. It seems to me akin to UFOs being regarded as presumed extra-terrestrial objects, rather than the literal meaning of unidentified ones.
Gaa-zing!
You’ve been pharyngulated!
Very pretty. Who is she?
;o)
:P
Hisname is Matsumoto Jun, a Japanese actor, and J-Pop boy band idol.
One chance at that, and I’ll thigh-lock his face.
14,1% Yes (7,501 votes), 83,6% No (44,419 votes). What the hell? Either there’s a website much more popular than Pharyngula and just as dedicated to wrecking stupid online polls, or this thing got hacked.
Don’t be ridiculous. Goblins could be hiding.
Um, Roestigraben, perhaps you should read the poll question again.
Ah, never mind, Roestigraben. I get you now.
<blush>
Miki Z @310:
It’s all so clear to me now.
53,151 votes
84% No
14% Yes
Uhm yeah, by us.
Hmmmm, Roesti !
I’ve never seen Pharyngula mobilize more than 40,000 voters for this stuff, and just a few hours ago, there were less than 10,000 ‘No’ votes (#315).
It’s not impossible, but you may have a point, looks like someone got the script generator out.
Roestigraben, indeed. As I make it, a good Pharyngulation accounts for “only” 10 kilovotes or so.
Again, I’m embarrassed by my misreading of your earlier comment.
Also, the Struldbrugs from Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver waxes on what he would do with immortality before being introduced to them, after which he recants.
In utter fairness, I think that’s New Agers and the like. To my understanding, with very, very very few exceptions like bodhisattvas and Vishnu, nobody cares to try to figure out who they were specifically. Either it’s recognition of how insanely selfish it is to say JE SUIS NAPOLEON, or the religions themselves don’t actually care.
Aquaria,
Dammit, did you have to tell me this? I’m 20, so evidently I’m approaching the worst years of my life…
Knowing my luck, I was probably a woodlouse in my previous life. Or maybe a trout.
I think going from woodlouse to human is extremely lucky. To move up like that you must have been one kick-ass woodlouse.
Anyone beat me to it?
Thank you, shonny. Somebody should probably post this one too:
Ev.
I.
Dence.
Please.
Thank you.
*looks down, shuffles feet, glances around surreptitiously*
I think that Sastra should just bundle together all of her comments here on Pharyngula and publish them as a book. Minimal editing for continuity.
OK, but really? Really? Over 300 comments in a thread about NDEs and the afterlife, and nobody–even Ick!–has remembered the famous K*nny?
When I read PZ’s post, my first thought was “K*nny wrote his book?!” but then I saw the author’s MD. nah.
Having died once myself (for about 43 seconds in Jan 07), I may have some qualification to speak on near death experiences. I wish I could say there was a tunnel and a light so I could write a book and perhaps make some money. My experience was similar to falling asleep, but no dreams. I woke up a day or so later not having had any perception of events in between. No light, no tunnel, no flashes of anything, just nothing. Maybe it was because I’m an atheist :)
Tithonus was the lover of Eos, the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to give him eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth, so he aged and shrank and stiffened and whined until eventually he turned into a cricket.
It’s true. That really happened.
Susan Blackmore has a good book on NDEs.She actully had one, and then researched the phenomenon thoroughly. Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences, Prometheus Books, 1993, ISBN 0-87975-870-8
Posted as ‘anti-wishfulthinkingist’ on newsvine
Life before death – reality at work
Life after death
– wishful thinking of the highest order
– like an iceberg idea, serenely beautiful, but large and slow moving with a vast potential for destructive power.
Meh…whatever sinks your Titanic.
20.9%
Yes.
12,967 votes
76%
No.
47,235 votes
3.2%
I’m not sure.
1,974 votes
SEF@44
I saw a BBC production recently in which Victorian ladies were wont to retire to their rooms to eat oranges, it being considered too sensual and vulgar to eat oranges in the company of others. All that sucking, you know. And, some of them preferred poking a hole in the orange, holding it to their mouth, and sucking the juice out.
Sorry to hear about your sore throat. God will miss your services, I’m sure. (Though you would think his mormon harem would keep him occupied.)
My cousin Walter had a near death experience once. True Story. He was in a dark tunnel, he saw some kind of light coming closer and he heard a sound: “chugga chugga choo choo!”
The people who have actually *had* these experiences are not the best people to judge whether it was a genuine encounter with the afterlife? You and other skeptics are the best judges no doubt? Please tell me you’re kidding Mr PZ Myer . . .
Exactly.
People who understand how the mind works are better suited than the person who just had a traumatic experience and is subject to any number of psychotic phenomenon associated with trauma.
Confirmation bias being a big fat one.
No, “experiences” are not evidence. They can be delusions caused by the brain shutting down. See Susan Blackmore cited above. And they aren’t reproducible, or even correct, as stated above by many folks. Brain chemistry does funny things when the brain is shutting down. No need to unnecessarily complicate matters by believing OOB experiences are real.
For all their talk about “depth” and “holism,” supernaturalists seems to have a lot of trouble separating appearance from reality.