XPost: sci.math
From: john@please.see.sig.for.email.com
In sci.math Jesse F. Hughes wrote:
> JohnF writes:
>>>> I'd have to guess that, if true, out-of-body means that your
>>>> living brain is somehow responsible for generating your out-of-body
>>>> persona. Kill off your in-body brain and it's bye-bye to that
>>>> out-of-body you, too.
>>>
>>> But your guess is not what most believers in the afterlife would think.
>>> At least, as far as I reckon, they are dualists, believing that the mind
>>> is not merely identical with (or some sort of feature of) the brain.
>>
>> "Believe" is the word, all right. Anybody's free to believe whatever
>> they want. The rub here is that many of these believers try to
>> shove their beliefs down other people's throats, as if their
>> beliefs are more than just beliefs. Some get argumentative, angry,
>> red-faced enraged at any contradiction to their beliefs.
>> And some can get violent.
>
> Well, I haven't seen any evidence of such despicable behavior in this
> particular discussion. In any case, no one is trying to defend bad
> behavior.
True enough. I was tangentially referring to dogmatic religious
beliefs, rather than strictly afterlife beliefs. They're usually
correlated, though there could be afterlife without God, and
vice versa, too. But discussions about one typically involve
the other. And religious zealots abound. And I've also seen that
kind of zeal migrate to completely different topics of discourse.
But, again, true enough, I was overstepping vis-a-vis this
specific thread.
>>>> Anyway, I'd go along with those 0% successes, and guess that
>>>> it's all a bunch of malarkey. Why does anybody follow up on
>>>> this kind of foolishness?
>>>
>>> The people carrying out the experiment had some earlier results that
>>> they interpreted as suggestive that NDEs are real, not hallucinatory,
>>> events, if I understand correctly. You can imagine that such a belief
>>> would be good motivation to investigate further. Seems to me that their
>>> experiment (depending on its details) appropriately tests for a
>>> negative result and so this is a pretty good reaction -- far better than
>>> we usually see for similar claims.
>>>
>>> Anyway, my guess is that the actual results have not yet been reported,
>>> but I'd also wager 0% success rate. My criticism with HVAC wasn't over
>>> his belief that NDEs were malarkey, but with the fact that he pulled a
>>> half-remembered experiment out and pretended that he knew the outcome
>>> and had citations. If such an experiment had been conducted, I wanted
>>> to know more.
>> Sure, for near-death-but-not-dead out-of-body experiences, where you
>> eventually get a chance to objectively interview the revived subject,
>> controlled experiments are possible. Is it so hard to figure out how
>> to interpret 0% success?
>
> On this, I disagree. A large number of persons think that NDEs are
> actual out-of-body experiences. An experiment which repeatedly fails to
> verify this claim seems useful -- far more useful than just saying that
> the other side is too dogmatic and should cut it the heck out.
Sure. Works for me. Be an investigator. Anybody capable, who feels
there's something to all this, that's not been revealed by existing
investigation, should absolutely go out and design their own
better experiment. I'll absolutely accept any well-designed,
well-interpreted, with repeatable results (to, say, three standard
deviations), experiment. Go do it. But what you've got here is
people asserting what they think the results of such experiments
would reveal, without feeling the need to actually go do them.
And they're apparently pooh-pooh'ing the only available experiments
with 0% success. So, yeah, I'd call that dogmatic -- asserting an
opinion as if it were a fact. And they should "cut it the heck out" --
shut up and go design and do some irrefutable experiment. I dare them.
That'll put me in my place, all right. But until then, let them stay
in their own place, i.e., they've got absolutely nothing.
> But, on this, respectable folk can disagree. And you were once
> respectable folk. Back before you sullied Romero's good name.
Not that I'm `dissing Romero, just that flick had a pretty
downbeat -- dare I say distasteful -- ending. For entertainment
purposes, I preferred the "valley girl conquers all" ending.
They even put that "driving off into the sunset" scene literally
into the ending. Who said zombies can't be funny?
--
John Forkosh ( mailto: j@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
