(2023-06-25, 04:59 PM)Sam Wrote: [ -> ]As a matter of fact, Merle, Keith Augustine, whom you gleefully seem to enjoy to cite often here, likes to use anecdotes in his book about people who have had mental impairment due to brain damage to attempt to make his point, or selectively picking out a few testimonies of near-death experiences to claim that near-death experiences are hallucinations. Should we dismiss those as anecdotes as well, Merle? Or would you say that we should accept them too, because they agree with your preconceived worldview?
Yeah Split Brain & Blindsight have had increasing questions, and of course the debunking of Libet Experiments as well.
Also cases like Phineas Gage may just be made up if doctors/surgeons are corroborating their patients' OOBEs for....some reason...
(2023-06-25, 05:13 PM)Brian Wrote: [ -> ]I think you are trying to say in the first quote "Absence of evidence equals evidence of absence"
LOL, no, if you repeatedly test a hypothesis, and it repeatedly comes out that your hypothesis yields results no better than chance, that indeed is a significant result.
This reminds me of a paper I used in a debate 20 years ago and forgot about:
https://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/G...75.OCR.pdf . People tend not to publish studies that show no significant effect for the hypothesis, which then results in a built in bias against the conclusion that the hypothesis is wrong.
In this case, the hypothesis of survival has been tested many times, and the results keep coming out that the occurrences that would match survival happen no more than would be expected by chance.
Merle, I know you may have little time in your hands, but I suggest browsing other portions of the site about research on those topics and reach your conclusion, and I say this as a individual that is neutral, but admitedly biased for the "skeptic" side.
(2023-06-25, 01:57 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]The Materialist faith is based on denial, a fundamentalist religion that accepts no heresies.
Have to repeat "Consciousness is an Illusion" to one's self, even though that's one of the most ad hoc ideas ever put forward to hold onto a belief...
Is Consciousness Real? Philosopher Daniel Dennett tries, once again, to explain away consciousness
John Horgan (another atheist who doesn't believe in Survival)
Quote:Consider how Dennett talks about qualia, philosophers’ term for subjective experiences. My qualia at this moment are the smell of coffee, the sound of a truck rumbling by on the street, my puzzlement over Dennett’s ideas. Dennett notes that we often overrate the objective accuracy and causal power of our qualia. True enough.
But he concludes, bizarrely, that therefore qualia are fictions, “an artifact of bad theorizing.” If we lack qualia, then we are zombies, creatures that look and even behave like humans but have no inner, subjective life. Imagining a reader who insists he is not a zombie, Dennett writes:
Quote:Dennett’s arguments are so convoluted that he allows himself plausible deniability, but he seems to be advocating eliminative materialism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines as “the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.”
Quote:Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them, which compels him to stake out unsound positions. His belief that consciousness is an illusion is nuttier than the belief that God is real. Science has real enemies—some in positions of great power--but Dennett doesn’t do science any favors by shilling for it so aggressively.
As atheists follow the prediction by Bertrand Russell in my signature, ideally we can get past people evangelizing Materialist Fundamentalism and focus on ideas that are not so easily dismissed as the idea that non-conscious constituents will produce consciousness.
(2023-06-25, 06:21 PM)quirkybrainmeat Wrote: [ -> ]Merle, I know you may have little time in your hands, but I suggest browsing other portions of the site about research on those topics and reach your conclusion, and I say this as a individual that is neutral, but admitedly biased for the "skeptic" side.
I think someone who felt the brain made of non-conscious constituents could produce consciousness would be better off reading works by a neuroscientist-philosopher like Raymond Tallis.
But then I generally feel only when people see the problems of the Materialist faith can they be open to looking at Survival evidence in a more unbiased way.
(2023-06-25, 07:29 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]Again, multiple controlled studies confirm the conclusion that there is no significant finding for survival above that which is expected by chance.
Please do cite your sources, Merle. I'd be interested in reading these studies and how well they hold up to scrutiny in light of the more recent studies.
Since you mention statistics and above chance expectations, let me ask: are you referring to mediumship studies?
Because, in fact, meta-analysis of various studies of information provided by mediums under controlled contidions actually find strong support of anomalous cognition on the part of mediums.
Sarraf, M., Woodley, M., Tressoldi, P. (2020).
Anomalous information reception by mediums: A meta-analysis of the scientific evidence.
Explore 17, 10.1016/j.explore.2020.04.002.
