The Gnostics called NPCs "hylics" (the spiritual seed of Cain). Those who were conscious but dragged down into worldly concerns and their own bodies were "psychics" (the seed of Able). Those who had glimpsed the realities outside materiality were "pneumatics" (the seed of Seth). Granted, some of them seemed to believe that people reincarnated until everyone eventually attained the gnosis and escaped the world-prison/simulation of Yaldaboath, the deluded, evil creator of the material cosmos.

Very nice analysis :up: :up:

Doing much better exceeds my ability, I'm afraid.

Bayesian inference is certainly well-suited to formalizing some of these issues, but there are complications I'm not sure how to handle.

Suppose a neighbor calls to say they saw your dog in the road. You'll have to weight that report against your belief that she couldn't get out, and the possibility that it was another dog altogether. (There is a fair amount of work on using Bayes to analyze eyewitness identifications in law enforcement, for example.) Your credence that your dog is out goes up, but not quite to belief, after one report. But if you get another call from another neighbor, your credence probably goes up even more than the first time.

What's crucial here is that the reports be independent. It's no help if Tim calls to tell you that Jane told him she saw your dog, if Jane already called you.

This is why the word "coincidence" is important in Sam's remarks; "coincidence" implies independence. But we know the stories we're evaluating aren't entirely independent. Nancy Rynes mentions thinking, if this is the afterlife, where are my dead relatives? Shouldn't they be here to greet me?

Suppose instead of an escaped dog, we're evaluating UFO reports, or, better still, just reports of some inexplicable object. Tim saw a thing in the woods that he can't identify, but he can describe it; Jane independently gives a very similar description. We might have pretty high confidence that they saw the same thing. That they can't identify it would, I think, actually increase our confidence, and it's worth thinking about why.

Sam argues that the similarity of NDE reports is, in just this way, a point in their favor. Of course, it is, but it's also a problem, because it makes it harder to determine just how independent these reports are, in two senses: first, it strains credulity to claim culture plays no part at all in these stories; second, the claim to know and understand what you experienced means the subject's pre-existing beliefs and concepts play a bigger role than in the case where Tim and Jane give a bare description of something they do not claim to be able to categorize.

In other words, the fact that the experience can be described at all is surprising and therefore troublesome, and that it can be described so well and its meaning be made perfectly clear, that's even worse. (Nor does it help that so much of the afterlife is so much like this reality only better. The place was beautiful, like earth, but more. I felt loved, like people do, but more.) "I came face to face with the ultimate reality, of which what I thought was real is a mere shadow, and I understood exactly what I was experiencing, and I can explain it to you."

If that's so, that in itself is an heroic act of Bayesian updating, one we are asked to reproduce.

Two more little notes on the similarity of stories

Not for nothing, but it's a motif of crime stories, that if two people being interrogated give accounts that seem too similar, especially if they use some of the same specific words or phrases or pick out the same details, they are suspected of colluding.

That point about words and details actually has an academic pedigree: it is a core technique of comparative mythology. If some peculiar detail is repeated in two stories, a character missing a finger, something like that, this is taken to indicate that the stories are related, perhaps one story being a source for the other, or the two sharing a common source, perhaps unknown.