NDEs: It still comes back to epistemology (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Monday, November 02, 2020, 18:54 (1268 days ago) @ xeno6696

xeno:I'm going to have to shelve this for now. Part of why I brought up this old ghost is because I left it lingering, and I restarted a book I originally picked up to discuss here a few years back, "problems of knowledge." It seems, had I spent a bit more time studying it, I'd have a better understanding about where some of my own epistemological train jumps tracks. I'm essentially a full-on positivist, and as we should recall... Positivism was roundly refuted a good 60-80yrs ago... but it seems I like others, by not REALLY learning my history, are actively repeating it.

dhw: Unless you’ve had first-hand experience, it all boils down to whether you believe that every story is a hoax, or the result of a delusion, in which case you will dismiss NDEs and every psychic experience in which people have acquired knowledge they could not have acquired under the prevailing circumstances. (I’m only interested in those stories where the acquired knowledge has been confirmed by witnesses.) Other people will believe the stories, and some of us will keep an open mind. But you need to know the stories before you make a decision!

xeno: This is exactly my problem: I've identified that I'm a pretty strict foundationalist when it comes to epistemology... which probably doesn't shock you given the years even forgiving my hiatus.

The problem with foundationalism is that since it focuses on a posteriori knowledge, it has a strong tendency to force people to exclude anything that might possibly be a priori, which to me explains precisely why the topic of NDEs and OBEs gets short shrift, veridical or not. This reckoning was long in the coming though, now that I'm a thoroughgoing Buddhist, *everything we do* is in the mind here, so what, am I to suppose that just because we don't have a physical explanation that tells us precisely what a thought *is* that we have to throw out all of the mind-dependent information we can process in our heads?

I appreciate you trying to bring it to the common-sense level, but I've got a more fundamental flaw that if not fixed, will continue to cloud my own 'common sense' as it were.

You have identified your problem, but there has to be a 'common sense' view. Since you disappeared the research has continued through Sam Parnia MD, currently summarized in his book "Erasing Death", describing his findings in resuscitation research, with the attendant OOB and NDE episodes. Obviously he has not come upon answers.