Afterlife: Matt Take Notice!!! (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 06, 2012, 12:32 (4683 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: Being pronounced dead – doesn’t mean you’re dead. It doesn’t even mean you’re not conscious – it means you’re unable to respond, like a coma victim or a sufferer of sleep paralysis.

David has explained the difference. You’ve quoted me in relation to the Reinee Pasarow incident, and then ignored the implications: “she saw her own body from the outside...she saw real people doing real things, although clearly there was no visible sign of her seeing or registering anything. [...] How do you see people, scenes and events all around you without moving your eyes and your body?” (No patient in a coma could have seen what she saw.) But far more importantly, as I keep stressing over and over again in relation to “veridical NDEs”, how do patients obtain information they could not have acquired by any known means? There are several instances of this, but you don’t deal with them. Why not? Here are some of your comments:

1) “David will probably find this a cop-out, but I cannot make a judgment here.”
I also find it a cop-out, and unfortunately you do make a judgment.

2) “Having never had an experience like this myself, I can’t be anything but intensely skeptical”.
If someone obtains information by unknown means, and that information is corroborated by several witnesses, are you saying everyone concerned was a liar or was suffering from some kind of collective delusion? If not, what are you sceptical about? Do you never believe anything people report unless you’ve experienced it yourself?

3) “I’m not really going to be able to put stock in fantastical experiences lacking the experience myself.” (Re modern day “magisters”, whose work we are not discussing.)
Are you saying that the list of verified experiences, observations, items of knowledge David and I asked you to consider were also “fantastical”? Why do you persistently focus on those aspects of such experiences that are NOT verifiable, when we are expressly asking you to consider those that ARE?

3) “If there was more unity in the experiences across cultures, I would be more inclined to take them seriously.”
So observations of REAL events and the acquisition of VERIFIED information are not to be taken seriously?

4) “I have a difficult time believing this story as-is. Part of it is because the only solution is Cartesian dualism. And nearly every philosophy that ever existed has extremely good arguments against dualism – Buddhism notwithstanding.”
Except, of course, those philosophers from Socrates and Plato onwards who believed in an immaterial soul, but I guess they don’t count. Not one of these “extremely good arguments” is able to explain consciousness. Not even the greatest of neuroscientists can explain consciousness. But your problem is clear: “the only solution is Cartesian dualism”, and you have decided that although nobody can explain consciousness, dualism is wrong, and therefore corroborated observations and information are not to be taken seriously. That is not scepticism, it is prejudgement.

Why do people from different cultures (including their demons!) have different experiences? I don’t know. Why is it only a small percentage of people who have these NDEs? (If dualism is correct, shouldn’t all the patients have experienced the separation of soul from body?) I don’t know. What is the source of consciousness? I don’t know. How do some people (not just during NDEs) gain access to information that is not accessible through normal channels? I don’t know. Does the brain operate the mind, or does the mind operate the brain? I don’t know. If you don’t know either, why don’t you keep your mind/brain open? Come on, Matt, take agrippan yourself!