Interesting read - thanks for sharing. I have recently been reading-up on near-death experiences, shared-death experiences, and tangential subjects and highly recommend books like:
On the one side I am happy to see more scientifically-minded people attracted to these topics. At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.
> At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.
Because we've never found one that isn't physically based. And then you get into what does it even mean to be physical or meta-physical. We have models but they are incomplete and we do not know what makes up the universe anyway, at the most fundamental level. Or even if we have an eye on the most fundamental level. The moment you prove a meta-physical thing exists it loses the meta and becomes another part of physics.
Nobody has proof of life after death. If they had actual proof that stood up to scrutiny and was reproducible, that would be a big deal. It would open up so many avenues of research into the dynamics of how it works. Currently there is no proof. People saying they've experienced things after nearly dying isn't proof, otherwise so many crazy things would be true. I don't know what a proof would look like, but often the experiences involve being disembodied, so a reproduced and reproducible experiment where someone having a near death experience can accurately describe something they couldn't have had prior knowledge of, or guessed, or sensed (heard) in a coma, or found out after waking but before describing, that would be proof. Anecdote is not enough.
And none of this is to say there is no life after death. You can't prove against such a concept, although you can constrain the mechanism until it has to be something completely unknown to science to be true. Enough people do believe in it that they'll continue to investigate it. I don't personally believe there is any more to ourselves than the physics that happens in our brains and bodies, and I think that's amazing enough... maybe even more amazing than the idea there is something more. However, I don't think it a bad position to have a different belief, and to say that science has no answer here, and probably never will.
I came across the Bigelow contest that had a sizeable prize for to people submit articles / essays arguing beyond a reasonable doubt that consciousness survives physical bodily death - here is a link to the top 3 winners: https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/bics-afterlife-pr...
There's some good material in there.
> I don't know what a proof would look like, but often the experiences involve being disembodied, so a reproduced and reproducible experiment where someone having a near death experience can accurately describe something they couldn't have had prior knowledge of, or guessed, or sensed (heard) in a coma, or found out after waking but before describing, that would be proof. Anecdote is not enough.
There are indeed multiple cases that follow that pattern that have been recorded and in papers (see an example below) - I think they're called "Peak in Darien" cases. The pattern is:
- Person has a near-death experience whilst unconscious
- Something happens whilst they are unconscious that they would have no natural means of knowing
- Same person comes back and has knowledge of what happened
I read the articles you posted. I'm sorry, I don't find any of them convincing. They are anecdotes and wishful thinking. In particular 2 focus on people communicating with dead people they didn't know had died. I've had a lot of dreams about a relative dying and talking to them, as well as many many dreams talking to dead relatives. That's the problem with that kind of reporting: people constantly dream and so occasionally you'll get weird coincidences across a huge population.
Again, I can't discount that it could be true, but it's not proof. It's not controlled. Further, people rationalize and make things up, not on purpose, but ask any 2 people to recount the same event and get 2 completely different stories.
Actual proof would be like we placed a random word on a high shelf, nobody involved in the experiment could see the word, it was collected without viewing. The disembodied people could relay the word at some percentage. That experiment or similar has actually been tried, though I read it a long time ago and can't find the paper - it didn't work out.
> At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.
For me it's a matter of the scientific method — if it doesn't hold up to appropriate scrutiny, as the metaphysical never does, I can not consider it any more than a curious misunderstanding.
In the case of Marc's story, I'm skeptical about whether the events happened as described before I even take other explanations for his knowledge of the language into account.
Agree about applying the scientific method. I do think it’s a range of phenomena that does not lend itself to the running of experiments.
That said - in the area of shared death experiences, you have multiple independent accounts of people experiencing the same phenomena, which is harder (or impossible) to brush off as “subjective” experience.
Once they will be able to transmit any kind of information, we can talk. There is a prize, btw, of $1M for anything paranormal that stands up to scrutiny. Nobody was able to claim it since its inception 60 years ago.
UPD turns out the prize was cancelled in 2015 presumably because 50 years of seathing through failures finally convinced the bidder of futility of the efforts.
From Wiki: Randi has said that few unsuccessful applicants ever seriously considered that their failure to perform might be due to the nonexistence of the power they believe they possess.
I think this is a bad decision, but I don't want to live in a world in which people risk their privacy by making poor decisions.
We just need processes to learn and avoid doing mistakes twice, and shaming is a poor way to do it.
If I risked being ashamed when making decisions, I would probably avoid decisions altogether. This would be awful. The discussed decision is not even out of law.
What we can do though, is to tell people we know and love about F-Droid and suggest them to only fall back to the Play Store if they don't find what they want, and that they should be aware that by doing so, they enter the jungle and that this jungle follows Google's arbitrary rules, some of which are not in their own interests.
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment... and find the way it's articulated refreshing. God forbid we say we hate something without someone being outraged. +1 to 98% hating Microsoft... but also kudos for VSCode and TypeScript.
These types of articles are a great reminder of how prevalent censorship is on mainstream services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Question - what other tech/services exists out there that supports freedom? Would that be in the form of distributed tech like mastodon, for example? Could these be leveraged to trigger tech giants to revert censorship?
Meh... It's demotivating to see that everyday services that everyone uses essentially limit perspectives on how life happens.
- Proof of Life After Life - https://tinyurl.com/proof-of-life-after-life-moody
- After - https://tinyurl.com/after-bruce-greyson
On the one side I am happy to see more scientifically-minded people attracted to these topics. At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.