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Everyone wants to believe there is more, but is there? There are many cases of people who have near-death expierences and say "there was a bright light" or, out of body expierences, seeing dead relatives and whatnot. Or, my personal favorite, Duncan macDougall and his expariments to find the weight of the human soul. What does DS think on this? | |||||
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If I may ... most of the "bright lights," "out of body experiences," and so on, are fairly well explained by modern medicine.. | |||||
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I call bullshit on all ideas that 'modern medicine' has explained anything. Science never /explains/ anything, it only gives you the 'best working idea we have right now', which is a cop out for really saying we don't know shit. Ok, microwave ovens and airplanes convince you we're getting somewhere, but I digress... | |||||
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Pascal's wager. Read it. It's a faith-logic reasoning scenario. Think about the optiIons rather the yes/no side of it. It's more interesting to me. | |||||
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On March 3, 2013, 11:02AM, abyss said: I call bullshit on all ideas that 'modern medicine' has explained anything. Science never /explains/ anything, it only gives you the 'best working idea we have right now', which is a cop out for really saying we don't know shit. You're confusing explanation with truth. You also need to define knowledge when you claim that we don't know anything. It also seems immensely arrogant the way you follow up that statement with your 'but here is how it really is' story afterwards. ----- If you can't convince them, confuse them. 3 members enjoyed this post. | |||||
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I'm sure science will one day figure out what's after death. In the mean time, if science can debunk religion and fallacies i'll be a happy man. 1 members enjoyed this post. | |||||
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On March 3, 2013, 2:41AM, taken said: Everyone wants to believe there is more, but is there? I highly doubt it. There's no compelling *reason* to believe mental phenomena can persist beyond the functioning of the material brain. My personal concern is what it means for consciousness to exist in our supposed physical world in the first place. What 'is' personal identity? Is 'I' singular or does it duplicate in some fashion? What does it mean to 'exist'? What 'is' existence? In particular, is it possible for the same conscious identity - such as 'you' or 'me' - to re-emerge naturally by means of some other physical processes in some other point in the cosmos? We don't know this, and that prospect is still unsettling (despite how unlikely this possibility also seems). But like I said, I don't see mental phenomena existing without some corresponding physical apparatus which causes it. But that doesn't mean our conscious identity is necessarily limited to this one instance in the vastness of space and time. Perhaps it is, and maybe we simply 'vanish' into the darkness when our physical brain dies. But we don't know. There is only reason to believe that a mind probably doesn't float around like a wisp without a body. On March 3, 2013, 11:02AM, abyss said: This did not happen in my head, nor was it a dream. Any attempts by you to say it was are just lies and your own self-deceptions. So there. Nyah. Problems: (1) But how do you know it wasn't in your head? In particular, how do you know your experience wasn't a product of your dying brain? Here's a rational explanation (even if it is a bit premature): (2) If you cannot be sure that you actually experienced anything beyond death, why would it be untrue for anyone to suppose that it was simply mostly likely a product of your dying brain? Something is untrue (or false) when you know that the opposite is true. But in this case, you cannot be trusted to know what may have happened any more than anyone else, due to the fact that people often make cognitive errors (and perhaps these errors are incredibly likely at the moment of death). Hence you should look at the cogency of any view which holds that it was simply in your head. You shouldn't simply dismiss alternative explanations - especially those which are rational. For that, itself, is the mark of self-deception. You may have this grand delusion about what happened to you, and if you simply ignore what anyone else says, how will you ever come closer to conforming or dying it? Taking it for granted that you did indeed experience things while dead is irrational. Here's a few cognitive errors people often make: (1) If you give people a list of words that all relate to the idea of "green," without actually saying GREEN, and then tell them to repeat the words they heard back to you, they will most likely list the word "green" as one of their responses. Why? Because they made the associations in their mind between the words given and a central concept to which all the words were related. And thus, they 'thought' they heard green, when they in fact didn't. The mind has many mechanisms that lead to similar errors in which you believe something that never actually happened due to such associations. (2) Another great error is when an event like 9/11 happens. (These can be any extremely emotional situation that a person is inclined to remember.) Essentially, people often say years later that they have "vivid" memory of exactly what they were doing when they found out that the Twin Towers had been attacked. They can remember what they had just eaten, where their family was, how they had just talked to, etc. In short, they believe they can remember a great many details about the time. These are called "flashbulb memories." Yet when psychologists actually ran a few studies, they found that although people were highly confident that they actually remembered many details, it turned out that their recollection years after the fact was highly inaccurate. What this means is that these memories are not very stable over time. And yet people - due to the apparent 'vividness' of these memories - end up believing that they are actually accurate. This is, in short, a cognitive error. (And I'm sure many of you reading this have also falsely thought you had accurate flashbulb memories at one time or another.) (3) The last cognitive error I want to note involves accusations of molestation. Essentially, many people believe in the power of hypnosis and trust eyewitness testimony. Yet as psychologists have found, many people often believe that they are recalling hidden (or "repressed") memories when in fact we are extremely impressionable under these states. For instance, one person placed under hypnosis actually confused a story she was reading for an actual childhood experience. Another person was watching a commercial of a familiar face on television when she was attacked by a robber. As it turns out, she accused the famous face she saw on television for the crime. And lastly, a study was done on a group of students. While watching a guest speaker give a lecture, they saw someone suddenly appear in the room and then run away. When asked to identity the face they saw at the door, many students said it was the guest speaker whom they had been staring at for quite a while. Moreover, in each of these errors, there is often 'rehearsal.' This just means that people initially believe one thing (accurate or inaccurate) and then simply tell themselves the same story, over and over until it becomes extremely familiar. In this way, many false memories or beliefs can be sustained over time as if they actually happened. And so, basically, the human brain is capable of error, and so it is difficult to take someone's word for granted - especially when most aspects of the world reduce to physical, rational explanation. We already have basic theories as to what's going on with near death experience, and these experiences probably are nothing more than features of a dying brain. So is it more rational to trust a fallible person or the consistency of rational investigation in producing reasonable explanations for various aspects of life? For the many reasons I have given, I'm going with rational explanation - not trust. Humans are extremely fallible under certain conditions. [This post was last updated on March 6, 2013, 1:19PM by Overman.] | |||||
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On March 3, 2013, 9:35AM, Singed said: Pascal's wager. Read it. It's a faith-logic reasoning scenario. Think about the optiIons rather the yes/no side of it. It's more interesting to me. Pascal's wager is a bullshit scenario. You can't frighten yourself into true belief. If you are acting like you believe on the off-hand chance that you might burn in an eternal lake of fire you will still burn in that eternal lake of fire. It's really just a way to bully people into perpetuating a flawed system of logic. 1 members enjoyed this post. | |||||
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On March 6, 2013, 3:39PM, Pinelli said: On March 3, 2013, 9:35AM, Singed said: Pascal's wager. Read it. It's a faith-logic reasoning scenario. Think about the optiIons rather the yes/no side of it. It's more interesting to me. Pascal's wager is a bullshit scenario. You can't frighten yourself into true belief. If you are acting like you believe on the off-hand chance that you might burn in an eternal lake of fire you will still burn in that eternal lake of fire. It's really just a way to bully people into perpetuating a flawed system of logic. I'm suggesting it as a concept, certainly not something to live by. People shouldn't live in fear over something like that. | |||||
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You missed the point: "You can't frighten yourself into true belief." 1 members enjoyed this post. | |||||
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On March 3, 2013, 2:41AM, taken said: Everyone wants to believe there is more, but is there? There are many cases of people who have near-death expierences and say "there was a bright light" or, out of body expierences, seeing dead relatives and whatnot. Or, my personal favorite, Duncan macDougall and his expariments to find the weight of the human soul. What does DS think on this? Look at it this way: Right now, all around you, everything in the universe you perceive and think you know about, is actually rolled up in your head. Is it in your brain or in your consciousness? Is your mind really the sum operations of your brain, or is it, like the force which makes physics work, part of the external universe outside of your body? If it is, then it stands to reason that whatever you believe about life before you die becomes your reality once you die - not a light matter really, because what you really believe is built out of the sum total of your life, your feelings, everything good and bad that ever happened to you... Did you ever stop to question, is the afterlife purely mental, just like life is? Maybe, the afterlife is lived in the dreams of the universal consciousness, and all you have are your thoughts to light the way. Or, maybe, you just die and nothing happens. |
| Last 10 Members to View This Thread | |
| Name | Time |
| Overman | Mar 20, 2013, 1:59AM |
| ErisianLiberationpHront | Mar 19, 2013, 3:52AM |
| Pinelli | Mar 18, 2013, 12:27PM |
| DJBOOmKitty | Mar 17, 2013, 3:47PM |
| Midian_Engill | Mar 7, 2013, 9:44AM |
| whoisdestiny | Mar 6, 2013, 11:51PM |
| Taken | Mar 6, 2013, 7:16PM |
| Singed | Mar 6, 2013, 4:25PM |
| Okapi | Mar 6, 2013, 12:26PM |
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