Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Monday, November 23, 2009, 21:22 (5478 days ago) @ David Turell

"I have said in my last post to you that NDE's are not hallucinations. Believe me, with 40 years in medicine, I know one when I hear one."-Your appeal to personal authority is obviously unwarranted. Otherwise, one has to wonder why there are still so many skeptics. Probably because the skeptics would argue that your medical training has no bearing on the interpretation of the phenomena you are describing. Your religious beliefs are getting in the way and when you make statements like this you are not speaking out of medical knowledge but from the prejudices of your religious beliefs. Otherwise, all atheists would be whistling Dixie, wouldn't they? On the other hand, maybe your word just hasn't gotten around. You seem to believe that your interpretations are an open and shut case. In that case, you owe it to mankind to write a book.-"You have asked me not to ignore your major in philosophy."-Did I? I don't remember that. In fact, I would hope you would utterly ignore any past education I may have had. Also, when I offer references, it's not as a presentation of unquestionable authorities, but as someone who may be able to explain something better than I can.-In general, there are always those who will remain skeptical when a person uses his experience in one field of knowledge as testimony to statements in another. Questions of the afterlife are religious questions, not medical questions. It's the same as Richard Dawkins holding up his scientific knowledge of evolution as proof that God doesn't exist. Speaking as an atheist isn't the same as speaking as a scientist. Likewise, proclaiming the validity of religious beliefs because of one's interpretation of medical observations amounts to an ad hominem argument.-Now, to address another aspect to my quote from you that starts off this post: "NDE's are not hallucinations." -These are real experiences, there's no doubt about that. However, what is reported as "seen" is just an interpretation of that experience. I believe that NDE's are the result of pushing consciousness as produced by the human brain to one of its extreme limits, and the same sort of thing is going on in the highest flights of mystical experience. The experience may so transcend normal consciousness that the brain has to make up a "story" about what actually happened. The brain looks through its catalog of extraordinary beliefs and perhaps finds ready-made, traditional religious beliefs and thrusts those forward, giving them an apparent reality that is very compelling. In that sense, they may just be hallucinations: giving reality to what is really just imagined.-There's utterly no guarantee that one's interpretation of an extraordinary mental experience describes something real. "A bright light was seen at the end of a tunnel, and all fear of death left me." That's fine as far as it goes, but to conclude, "Therefore there's an afterlife," is entirely unwarranted. -One may indeed have witnessed a reality that legitimately gives reason to lose all fear of death, but presenting a legitimate theory about why you should now feel that way may be entirely beyond such facile and incoherent explanations as that there is consciousness belonging to that individual after death. The real explanation has got to be more sophisticated than that, because that simple explanation has just too many problems of incoherency associated with it, stemming primarily from the fact that consciousness is a transitory process, not a persistent substance.