afterdeath

Karma: −9

afterdeath 13 Jan 2011 23:29 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: Is there anything after death?
I’ll check that out. I have yet to watch all of those talks.

afterdeath 11 Jan 2011 23:28 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: Is there anything after death?

Hypothesizing an afterlife based on NDEs requires the idea that consciousness can exist separately from the brain. This doesn’t seem warranted based on NDEs alone

This is exactly the argument I’m looking for. But I’m not sure if postulating other methods NDEs/ODEs could have happened is convincing that that’s how they happened in all cases. So I’m not sure if the conversation has reached the point at which we can say “ergo, NDEs don’t even suggest that consciousness can exist separately from the brain.”
My hope is that research into the brain and AI will give sufficient evidence that we can come to this conclusion without this discussion. Perhaps it already has and I’m unaware of it, but the research I’ve seen takes this as an assumption, not a conclusion.

afterdeath 11 Jan 2011 23:16 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Is there anything after death?
Hmm, what I said was poorly worded. I may edit it. What I meant was that I considered the evidence to be sufficient for me to believe in God. Here’s what I said:

I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn’t a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, I’m going to assume that there is a God.

Here’s what I meant:

until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn’t a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, my personal experiences are sufficient to convince me that there is probably a God.

Is that better?

If a patient happened to be hooked up to an MRI during what they later describe as an NDE, and the MRI recorded patterns characteristic of other events generally considered hallucinatory, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?

There is an underlying assumption here that hallucinations aren’t evidence of an afterlife. I don’t believe they are, but I also don’t have any beliefs about them in general, so the fact that it was a hallucination wouldn’t be convincing until I had more knowledge of hallucinations in general. Maybe hallucinations are our gateway to the eternal! (I don’t actually believe this, but I hope it helps you see what I’m saying).
That being said, knowing more about these experiences would only be a good thing, and I have no way of knowing how more knowledge would affect my beliefs, because I have no idea what that knowledge might be.

If it proved possible to experimentally induce an NDE experience by manipulating a subject’s brain in particular ways, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?

from this article:

According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.

Back to your question:

Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?

Possibly. Like I said before, more knowledge is only a good thing, and I have no idea how more knowledge would affect my beliefs. Hope I’m not dodging your questions here, feel free to elaborate on anything I might have missed.

afterdeath 11 Jan 2011 23:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Is there anything after death?
[I’m going to leave this comment like it is, but I’m adding this edit for clarification. After a second read-through, I do agree that the quote I posted proves that NDE’s aren’t compelling evidence in the sense that they aren’t definite proof of God/the afterlife/whatever. But I don’t think they proved that NDE’s aren’t valid evidence, which it seemed to me at first they tried to do, and I then realized that they hadn’t. So take this comment with a grain of salt, and see what you can make of it]

DreadedAnomaly gave two good articles to read in his post below*, which could possibly explain OBE/NDEs as completely natural. These are pretty good articles, but they highlight a problem I have with the whole discussion: that the anti-afterlife side seems biased, too. For example, a quote from this article:

According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.

This (to me) certainly does not prove that NDE’s are not compelling evidence, it proved that it was not necessarily compelling evidence. It suggested that NDE’s were not compelling evidence and further argument might have convinced me, but it seemed a bit too soon to call it a “proof” to me. (and there was no further argument, because they thought they had proved it)
Things like this cause me to question whether there is anyone who has published unbiased arguments for or against God or the afterlife. Responses to this post don’t seem to escape bias, and while we can account for bias, it’s particularly difficult to do so for a topic where I’m questioning whether I’m biased myself.
*http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ok/is_there_anything_after_death/3bgr

afterdeath 11 Jan 2011 22:48 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheRev’s comment on: Is there anything after death?

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

afterdeath 11 Jan 2011 22:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: Is there anything after death?

Personally, I find Occam’s Razor convincing. Doesn’t it strike you as unlikely that there would be a God, but the only evidence for God would be subjective experiences?

without evidence, the probability of God, the afterlife, etc. is going to come up very low from a Bayesian evaluation.

That’s the whole point I’m getting at here. Should I consider these things evidence? How do I objectively decide? I’m obviously biased to believe in an afterlife and in God and in the supernatural so how do I overcome this bias and look at the evidence objectively? Your former arguments (I’m reading the first article now and it’s exactly what I was looking for) could possibly give me reason to “defy the evidence” as E.Y. would say but I’m not at that point yet. I’m coming from a background of religion, and I’ve denied most of the things I’ve been taught, but should I deny all of them? I’m trying to be objective here, but it’s hard to know whether I am or not (although whether my beliefs are wrong are right is independent of whether I was biased when I decided upon them). by supernatural I mean a universe or some other similar type of thing that has the potential to affect our physical world; Yudkowski would argue that if this exists it isn’t supernatural, but I think it’s a useful term

afterdeath 11 Jan 2011 21:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Is there anything after death?

was the idea/half-belief already present and NDEs/OBEs only make it slightly more likely or difficult to rule out entirely?

That is almost certainly true. But it doesn’t make the first part of your statement false.

Do things like NDEs and OBEs alone lead you to think that there is a possible afterlife[?]

I’m trying to objectively decide the answer to this question. It’s difficult because of your other point.

you might be discussing this topic as if a certain set of evidence matters, when it really has nothing to do with why you deal delicately with the afterlife idea while harshly with the other unsupported hypotheses I listed above

If this is true, how do I know? If I’m biased to believe in an afterlife and evidence that would otherwise not applicable becomes convincing to me because of my bias, how would I be able to tell this is true rather than the alternative? (which is that I’m unbiased and that the evidence really is convincing)

afterdeath 10 Jan 2011 22:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Is there anything after death?
Out-of-body experiences are very interesting to me as well. The first response seems to be to ignore them or to assume that they are lying. My response is to cautiously accept that they might be telling the truth, but to wait until we can find out more about what is going on. This could possibly be by using evidence gathered from careful experiments, possibly by using arguments from thought experiments.

afterdeath 10 Jan 2011 21:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Normal_Anomaly’s comment on: Is there anything after death?

Richard Feynman gave himself one on purpose and described it in Surely You’re Joking. It’s also quite interesting.

I need to read this! I’m intrigued!

afterdeath 10 Jan 2011 21:56 UTC
0 points
in reply to: nhamann’s comment on: Is there anything after death?
A fine argument. I appreciate that you accept that there could be evidence that the brain does not completely implement consciousness (not that I believe that it doesn’t, I just accept that it might not. I will live as if it does until I have reason to believe that it doesn’t)

afterdeath 10 Jan 2011 21:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Is there anything after death?

In general, personal observation by humans is not strong evidence.

I agree. I also appreciate that you did not exclude it as evidence entirely.
I do not expect my personal experiences to be very convincing to anyone other than myself (Daniel Dennett wrote a very eloquent description of why this is true, it’s in my room, I may post it here later). However, I am very convinced by my own experiences. I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn’t a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, my personal experiences are sufficient to convince me that there is probably a God. [edited for clarification; I previously concluded that I would assume that there is a God, which was wrong]

Additionally, while one personal experience is not very convincing, many similar personal experiences can be. You can say that it is possibly group hallucination or something of that sort (a large prank, confused people, etc.), but until I have extra reason to believe that these people are wrong, I won’t assume that.

Furthermore, even if you do accept that the stereotypical bright light and tunnel is evidence of an afterlife, why assume there’s anything beyond that? Maybe the entire afterlife consists of a few seconds of bright light. And when you reach the light, the result is oblivion. There’s nothing in the evidence that rules that out.

An interesting point. Not sure what my response to that is.

It would be really nice if there were an afterlife, but the vast majority of evidence is against it.

What evidence against the afterlife is there?

Indeed, given human desire for an afterlife, the fact that the best evidence is weak claims like NDEs,

Weak evidence like NDEs still requires an explanation. The obvious recourses are hallucination, neural anomalies, etc., but until I have extra evidence to support them, I won’t believe them. If studies have been done to show that they are hallucinations, etc., then that would be sufficient. I don’t know of any.

that itself becomes evidence against an afterlife, because with that much motivated cognition if there was strong evidence for an afterlife, it seems unlikely someone would not have hit on it by now.

What evidence might convince you? Simply curious, I can’t think of any. Similarly, life could come from invisible unicorns prancing around our galaxy, but I can’t think of any evidence for that. My reaction is different, though: I simply say “if it is, I can’t know” not “there can’t be, because we haven’t seen evidence for it.” I really don’t like saying that God can’t exist, there can’t be an afterlife, etc., because we don’t have evidence for which isn’t the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.

afterdeath 10 Jan 2011 21:40 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: TheRev’s comment on: Is there anything after death?
From my original post:

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.