Are we allowing dreams into evidence now?
As real as your father’s experience may have been, it is still subjective, and thus really doesn’t have any bearing on the rest of us.
For instance, say I had a very exciting dream involving myself, Keira Knightley, and few clothes. A rational response would be to write it off as a very good dream. An irrational response would be to become convinced that Ms. Knightley was infatuated with me and start writing her creepy letters. Likewise, if your father simply wrote this off as a dream, perhaps one whose effects were amplified by his compromised physical state, that would be rational. If that leads him to accept as fact the existence of an afterlife, despite the complete lack of any objective evidence, that would be irrational. The difference here is that your father’s dream deals with death and religion, two subjects which cause most people to throw rationality out the window. Had he had the same dream one random night while lying peacefully asleep at home, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. My dream wouldn’t be any more real if it happened on a hospital bed, why should your father’s be?
My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I’m not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.
One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people’s minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don’t believe that because the world doesn’t seem to work that way. But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley’s crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then? At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
Why aren’t dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don’t usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation. But what if we found that dreams weren’t explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world. So don’t just say that dreams aren’t evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.
Also, see Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment:
A person still has a subjective experience of a false memory; it’s just that their proposed explanation (“I remember X, so it must have happened”) isn’t correct. A very similar scenario to NDEs, actually.
One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people’s minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don’t believe that because the world doesn’t seem to work that way.
The world doesn’t seem to work this way because there has been no reproducible empirical evidence that it works that way. This isn’t a case of “The Earth looks flat from here, so it must be flat.” You’re postulating that there is another realm of existence out there that doesn’t intersect with our reality in any detectable way. At this point, you’re just arguing for an invisible pink unicorn or a Russel’s teapot, but then you say that this undetectable ‘dream world’, does affect the physical world by altering our minds to act as though it did exist. It’s essentially the same argument that the zombie theorists make.
But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley’s crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then?
At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology are wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein who supported them with evidence, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, and that the human brain has evolved a region for sending and receiving signals via this fifth force, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Why aren’t dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don’t usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation.
Bingo. We can explain dreams with psychology without resorting to ‘parapsychology’. When in doubt, consult Occam.
But what if we found that dreams weren’t explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world.
Yes, if that were the case, we would, but it isn’t.
So don’t just say that dreams aren’t evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.
And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?
But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley’s crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then?
At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology were wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Are we allowing dreams into evidence now? As real as your father’s experience may have been, it is still subjective, and thus really doesn’t have any bearing on the rest of us. For instance, say I had a very exciting dream involving myself, Keira Knightley, and few clothes. A rational response would be to write it off as a very good dream. An irrational response would be to become convinced that Ms. Knightley was infatuated with me and start writing her creepy letters. Likewise, if your father simply wrote this off as a dream, perhaps one whose effects were amplified by his compromised physical state, that would be rational. If that leads him to accept as fact the existence of an afterlife, despite the complete lack of any objective evidence, that would be irrational. The difference here is that your father’s dream deals with death and religion, two subjects which cause most people to throw rationality out the window. Had he had the same dream one random night while lying peacefully asleep at home, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. My dream wouldn’t be any more real if it happened on a hospital bed, why should your father’s be?
From my original post:
One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people’s minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don’t believe that because the world doesn’t seem to work that way.
But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley’s crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then?
At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
Why aren’t dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don’t usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation. But what if we found that dreams weren’t explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world. So don’t just say that dreams aren’t evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.
Also, see Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment:
The world doesn’t seem to work this way because there has been no reproducible empirical evidence that it works that way. This isn’t a case of “The Earth looks flat from here, so it must be flat.” You’re postulating that there is another realm of existence out there that doesn’t intersect with our reality in any detectable way. At this point, you’re just arguing for an invisible pink unicorn or a Russel’s teapot, but then you say that this undetectable ‘dream world’, does affect the physical world by altering our minds to act as though it did exist. It’s essentially the same argument that the zombie theorists make.
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology are wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein who supported them with evidence, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, and that the human brain has evolved a region for sending and receiving signals via this fifth force, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Bingo. We can explain dreams with psychology without resorting to ‘parapsychology’. When in doubt, consult Occam.
Yes, if that were the case, we would, but it isn’t.
And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?
JoshuaZ gave good answers in his post below
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ok/is_there_anything_after_death/3bhr
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology were wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.