If qualia is real, why does it have to be paranormal

My step-mother was a hard-nosed, no-nonsense Yorkshire woman who was intolerant of talk about ghosts and spooky stuff in our home...

Hope for me yet then…

Yet you dismiss them all? They are all lying or deluded?

I don’t know about dismissing them, but the stories are all over the place so it’s not easy to read too much into them, let alone form a model of the afterlife. There’s clearly something very human in experiencing and sharing the hope of these tales.

It doesn't really seem comparable. Accounts of the paranormal stretch back to early recorded history, with witnesses talking about their own experience not a singular election that seems - in some of these cases you cite - are literally a world away.

But this also assumes that every claim of the paranormal is of equal weight, which is as untrue as every claim of election fraud is plausible or even every sexual harassment claim is given equal weight to people hearing the claims.

You're basically taking a single claim of election fraud you expect most of the people here to believe is false, and then making a false equivalence between this conspiracy theory and every claim of the paranormal across time.

It's just very, very flawed as an analogy. It works well as an attempt at emotional manipulation though I guess?

Whether or not you like the analogy, it doesn’t alter the fallacy.

At this point I don't consider skeptics to have anything to say worth listening to. They'll continue to act like its all woo woo while others are building it. It doesn't mean every claim is valid what matters is the evidence. And so those who handwave things as woo woo are just stating they aren't interested in evidence, only justifying their own prejudices and laziness.

I know from past discussions that you place most empahsis on personal experience. I can't give examples of personal experience because those I have had, while suggestive, are not rock-solid enough for even me to accept as beyond doubt. I've talked about them with family and friends who either believe me or think I'm remembering something that happened in a dream (or other similar explanations).

However, I am prepared to believe others who I have known for years and know to be neither delusional nor prone to dishonesty. Even more telling is the fact that some are (or had been) vehemently opposed to "all that psychic crap". Friends who have been lifelong atheists yet have had an experience that has shaken their worldview. Unfortunately, it tends to be common for people (including myself) to lose certainty that such-and-such an event really happened - or happened in the way that I first related it. Doubt creeps in quickly because, I think, we fear what others will say - that we may be mocked or even pitied. 

Lastly there are those who used to be hard-line sceptics. Those who used to be the ones to mock and sneer. We have them here and I've lost count of the serious parapsychology researchers who claim to have started out as a sceptic, determined to debunk the nonsense. Bruce Greyson describes that journey in his recent book on his NDE research.

You can't take someone who has had an NDE into a lab, turn on a recording device and say - ok, show us. So I choose to accept that at least some of the anecdotal accounts happened exactly as described.

I don’t know about dismissing them, but the stories are all over the place so it’s not easy to read too much into them, let alone form a model of the afterlife. There’s clearly something very human in experiencing and sharing the hope of these tales.

I agree that it is not enough to be able to form a model of the afterlife. I'm not even sure that the experiences are proof of the afterlife even if true and verbatim. Ian Stevenson was careful to use the phrase "suggestive of ..." and I'm inclined to follow his example. 

That said, it is still very difficult to preclude some very convincing cases such as Pam Reynolds or any number of the Stevenson cases. You've been part of the discussion for years so you know what I'm talking about.  But even if those cases are solid evidence, they don't even come close to giving us a description of the afterlife or even confirming that there is such a thing. I'm somewhere in the 90% plus range of conviction that there is an afterlife because "suggestive of" is allied to a personal philosophy which allows for it. Were I a convinced materialist then "suggestive of" probably would never be enough no matter how strong the evidence.

I know from past discussions that you place most empahsis on personal experience. I can't give examples of personal experience because those I have had, while suggestive, are not rock-solid enough for even me to accept as beyond doubt. I've talked about them with family and friends who either believe me or think I'm remembering something that happened in a dream (or other similar explanations).

However, I am prepared to believe others who I have known for years and know to be neither delusional nor prone to dishonesty. Even more telling is the fact that some are (or had been) vehemently opposed to "all that psychic crap". Friends who have been lifelong atheists yet have had an experience that has shaken their worldview. Unfortunately, it tends to be common for people (including myself) to lose certainty that such-and-such an event really happened - or happened in the way that I first related it. Doubt creeps in quickly because, I think, we fear what others will say - that we may be mocked or even pitied. 

Lastly there are those who used to be hard-line sceptics. Those who used to be the ones to mock and sneer. We have them here and I've lost count of the serious parapsychology researchers who claim to have started out as a sceptic, determined to debunk the nonsense. Bruce Greyson describes that journey in his recent book on his NDE research.

You can't take someone who has had an NDE into a lab, turn on a recording device and say - ok, show us. So I choose to accept that at least some of the anecdotal accounts happened exactly as described.

I was supporting your points, not criticising them, in case that wasn't clear. Anecdotes are paradoxically the best and worst forms of evidence, and everything is ultimately an anecdote. all you can really do is try to put more and more peoples good reputation behind certain ones, which is ultimately how the peer review process and etc work. But it doesn't change the fact that its ultimately just words on a page that you can't prove unless you do the experiment yourself and then get your own anecdotal results. For some experiments that's impossible for the average person. So yeah, it makes sense that people would doubt certain claims, and even the claims that certain devices or similar operate off that claimed effect, there's no way to check any of it. So you do need to rely on reputation to get some semblance of trust that anything is real.

But that's also why I do expect skeptics to put their money where there mouth is. None of these things are that hard to test. And the refusal to try tells me that deep down they probably feel helpless in the world, and they won't do anything that could shatter that worldview. They need to shout down anyone who dares reach higher than they ever tried as someone succeeding at something they said was impossible exposes them to themselves.

I was supporting your points, not criticising them, in case that wasn't clear. Anecdotes are paradoxically the best and worst forms of evidence, and everything is ultimately an anecdote. all you can really do is try to put more and more peoples good reputation behind certain ones, which is ultimately how the peer review process and etc work. 

For sure - I did not take your comments as criticism. I was trying to make the point that I understand your advocacy for personal experience even though I don't have that much to offer myself.

I'm still waiting for Steve to link to a single thread where he has actually won an argument. I don't even mean one where I or anyone else concedes,

I just want a thread where he concludes with something other than a tantrum, rage-quit, or stubborn insistence that he - contrary to all intervening discussion/facts - is right.

Nobody ever wins an argument on a discussion forum.

I once asked one of our regular sceptics whether he actually believed that every anecdote, every research experiment, any and all evidence of paranormal anomalies - masses of which we have been at pains to present in this forum and previously at Skeptiko - if he believed that not a single element of that mass was true. His simple answer was that he believed all of it was deception or delusion.

Answering with an anecdote in a discussion about anecdotes, if you don't see the irony in that, i do not think that you really understand the fallacy of using anecdotes.

Personally I'm very little interested in the so-called 'afterlife'. It just isn't a big deal, as well as the word being loaded with a rejection of the 'beforelife'. Who is pondering and modelling the beforelife? Is the beforelife of interest or is it not?

For me there is only life.

I'm satisfied that we survive death, the body falls away but our self does not. But from all I've heard, as well as personal experience, it just isn't that big a change. I'm reminded of the times I had working in different countries. Initially it was a great surprise, almost always a pleasant one. Living and being somewhere else can be uplifting in itself. But after a while, after the dust has settled, I'm still me. In particular, if I was discontented or unhappy in one place, I found I was the same in another place. If I was happy and joyful in one place, I was the same in another. Wherever we go, we take ourselves with us. If we want a different future, it is ourselves which we should consider changing. Other than that, I have little care for tomorrow. Today is sufficient. The eternal now is all we ever have. Perhaps all that is.

A person can discount any and all reports of the paranormal, but it seems odd to dismiss them all definitely not worthy of attention without some a priori reason. Since consciousness is irreducible/fundamental, this dismissal would be doubly odd.

It always seems to me that the honourable starting point is one of neutrality. Too many times it seems from the beginning there is baggage brought along to the evaluation. We could just just look at an occurrence or a type of phenomenon with curiosity and examine it in detail. We can walk all around this stuff, or delve deep into it, there is no need to bring any expectations. If it turns out to be something unexpected, a result that doesn't fit, so much the better. As a child, making new discoveries was one of the joys. Finding out more, and being excited by it. That needn't stop just because we leave our childhood behind, the joy and excitement of discovery is still available. Leaving things without labelling them true or false seems natural to me. Having looked at something and not reached any particular conclusion, then the takeaway view would also be one of neutrality.