Sam, what are your thoughts on the meme argument for the corroborating evidence?
The meme argument would say the "after life/ OBE experience" is within the public psyche and so the brain deprived of sensory input attempts to predict where it is now and uses cultural attributions to fill in the gap. — JupiterJess
The ideology explanation doesn't hold up, because people of vastly, entirely, different ideologies, religions, and philosophies have reported basically the same NDEs. — Michael Ossipoff
What does "AP" stand for? — Michael Ossipoff
Dogmatic Materialists like to cite biological explanations. No sh*t :D All human and other animal consciousness is biological. What else is new..
Some people think that saying that consciousness is biological contradicts Idealism or the primacy and metaphysical priority of Consciousness. It doesn't. — Michael Ossipoff
Once I reached the highest intensity, all of a sudden my body felt like it was doing back flips in zero gravity, faster and faster and there I was, in a dream and lucid about it, — Vince
As for biological explanations, maybe I should repeat what I recently said about that:
All human and other animal consciousness is biological. What else is new.. — Michael Ossipoff
NDEs weren't in the popular culture or the popular mind before the publication of Raymond Moody's Life after Life. So NDE in popular culture doesn't explain the many NDEs described by Moody. — Michael Ossipoff
I honestly think ghosts floating above bodies has always been part of culture. Here's a really obvious one from Tom and Jerry: https://youtu.be/ofUzHtlil60?t=1m51s
You only have to also look at various mythology to see similar instances. — JupiterJess
You speak of all sorts of cultural elements, but NDEs' resemblance to those is rather rough, and a bit of a reach. ...in stark contrast to the uniformity of NDE reports. — Michael Ossipoff
Have you have heard of Karl Popper? This is the scientific method derived from his epistemology and in any form of dialectic this should be the primary method in order to not get biased towards a certain assumed conclusion. — Christoffer
A testimony can never serve as proof of a thing — Pilgrim
Millions of consistent testimonies can never serve as proof of a thing — Pilgrim
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
A testimony can never serve as proof of a thing — Pilgrim
Sam, it could be said straight out that the reason Tyson, Shermer, and others of that ilk can't accept that near-death experiences really amount to anything meaningful, is because if they did, then their world-view crumbles. — Wayfarer
Hello, I am a new member of this forum, and after reading some of the comments here, and skimping others, to me what is called valid testimonial evidence fits into the system of 'hearsay' because of relativism, not precision. — jufa
. No matter what argument you present you cannot separate the object from the subject.I've clearly distinguished between testimonial evidence that's hearsay, and testimonial evidence that has an objective basis
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