Mega-thread for help with rebuttals against skeptical talking points

Well it was posted on the AwareofAWARE blog, under New Era for Parnia? I brought it up here because both I and the OP were confused but also interested. His point was how can Tucker only be 'open' given all the stuff he's looked at? Is he just trying to remain professional? 

I think the point is, as a researcher, it is necessary to examine each individual case with an open mind. That it, any one case on its own may be an example of reincarnation, or it may be something for which there are other explanations. That is the only way to do research, surely? It is those who are not open to the possibility who have a more difficult stance to sustain under scrutiny.

I would add, with regard to Jim Tucker's work, personally I find his position useful.

I've come across many people who are firm believers in past lives, and who construct vast and complex belief systems about how everything works. Personally, though though I do consider reincarnation to be real, I find such belief systems turn me off, are positively repugnant at times,  because they seem to me to be stuffed full of assumptions and unsubstantiated claims, often promoted as though they were facts.

On the other hand, my personal preference is for those who are attempting to provide raw data on the topic. I respect that. The point at which data turns into a belief can be an awkward one, at best it means one starts to acquire expectations of "this is the way things are". When one is on a journey of discovery - as I consider myself to be - then "the way things are" is one of the unknowns which is still being uncovered.

I guess from my perspective the topic is vast, at best we are able to grasp some corners of it, but are unlikely to perceive the whole. Sometimes during an NDE a person might temporarily be able to see and understand much more, for example any and every question might be able to be answered. But on returning from the NDE to ordinary waking existence, some sort of veil of forgetfulness appears, such that a person "knows that they knew", but cannot recall what it was that they knew.

Concerning "Matthew's Mind":

I slightly modified and supplemented my comments here on Ben Platts-Mills' article on brain ventricular cyst surgery survivor Matthew, and posted it in the comments on the article. I added the following:

"At first glance this case looks like fertile ground for skeptic materialists to claim strong evidence against the existence a soul and an afterlife. And the deadening mood of existential nihilist materialist despair at the tragedy of being human pervades the essay, albeit that it is beautifully written. Both the protagonist Matthew and his psychotherapist appear to be neuro-materialists in philosophy of mind, though of different kinds. It doesn’t really matter, both must believe physical death is annihilation."

The author responded and didn't disabuse me of any of my statements and criticisms, implying that he agreed with most of them (or perhaps just didn't want to argue), but at the end he did offer some further information:

"For me, this is where the conversation becomes really challenging and interesting. In all honesty I still don’t know how Matthew’s version of ‘materialism’ and his version of Christianity fit together, or if they even do. I know that, in my own life, I have held beliefs or intuitions that are not always coherent or congruent, that are sometimes in conflict with one another from an intellectual standpoint. But this, surely, is what’s precious about thinking and feeling? Clearly, beliefs don’t need to be congruent in order to have an effect. Neither, ultimately, does an essay."

...............................................

"On the matter of identity change after brain injury, I think the best course of action is to ask brain injury survivors about it. I realize that this essay doesn’t go into great detail about the injury’s impact on Matthew but, again, it might be worth reading Matthew’s comments below. I would also point you to my book (Tell Me The Planets) and, perhaps better, to the free-to-read life stories at Who Are You Now?: www.whoareyounow.org. In my experience, there are survivors who talk very much of being the same person, there are those who say their former identity is not a relevant consideration. And there are those that want only to escape what seems to be a burdensome connection with a ‘self’ they can no longer relate to. A really good story to read on this is Nifty’s - she talks brilliantly about the struggles she has been through with her family over just this question."

Note: On the issue of what should constitute an acceptable essay, I would beg to differ. An essay needs to be coherent and make sense without internal contradictions and ambiguities.

I don't intend to address every point here, any more than I intend to trawl through the internet looking for sceptical articles in order to point out their faults.

However, this one was quite glaring and really stood out:


I can't tell whether this is deliberately done in order to mislead the reader. Or maybe the author himself is genuinely confused. Still, it should be clear that a patient during anaesthesia is NOT clinically dead. Hence the reference to the Lancet article here without explanation is quite strange.

It also should be pointed out that it is misleading, perhaps disingenuous, to state that Penny Sartori is a believer in the afterlife. Anyone who knows even a little of her approach to this area of study will recall that Penny started off as a believer that "when you're dead, you're dead" or a similar expression. She was definitely NOT a believer in the afterlife. Only later, as a result of her observations during her work caring for actual patients, did her views shift.

I suppose a school report might read something like, "Sloppy and careless work. Must try harder".

It's a good point, Typoz and I would add that it was also the case with Sabom, Fenwick, Van Lommel etc but that always seems to be conveniently forgotten. I'm actually beginning to loathe pseudo sceptics because of their terrible cynicism.

So this video is from a guy on YouTube who is very popular by this point, called Vsauce. In his series MindField, he ironically deals with topics pertaining to the brain moreso than the mind, but he has done episodes on the placebo effect and 'mind reading' (clickbaity to a degree). The following episode was somewhat controversial for dealing with religious experiences, and commenters were quick to note how the host Vsauce/Michael cuts off a doctor who is implying that exorcisms, for example, are probably products of a superstitious mind (presumably so as to avoid losing favour with his religious viewers). What do you think of the experiments? I'd recommend skipping to 16:35.

I still find it interesting how in this episode, and another he has produced on the effect, they don't really explain exactly what causes it, because to my knowledge, we don't actually know. Some believe it to be evidence of the mind affecting the brain, which goes against materialism. 

There was, however, this recent article I found highlighting the mystery of the Effect, with new evidence apparently suggesting it isn't based necessarily on conscious thought: https://anomalien.com/the-mystery-of-pla...-thoughts/

A research team from Massachusetts General Hospital in conjunction with the experts from Harvard Medical School showed that the placebo effect was based on the work of the unconscious brain.

Their article Nonconscious activation of placebo and nocebo pain responses was recently published in the PNAS journal. The brain decides how medicine will affect it even before the information about the drug is understood by the patient, the researchers claim.

The clinical and laboratory practice to date has accumulated a great deal of facts that cast doubt on the conscious nature of placebo and nocebo effects. Many cases suggest that they may occur without conscious processing of visual or verbal stimuli.



Often the improvement or deterioration in the health of patients advances automatically, without conscious acceptance of the idea that the drug or procedure must have some impact on them.



In these situations, imaging showed that the visual and verbal stimuli were processed by the brain of these people in the striatum, the evolutionarily more ancient parts and in the subcortical amygdala.


Experiments conducted by the authors of the study confirmed the hypothesis that the brain “decides” on the effects of a drug unconsciously – even before we carefully analyze the information about it.

For those wondering, this was his video on 'mind reading'. From his opening introduction, it's safe to say that he doesn't buy into parapsychology or telepathy. The episode deals with being able to predict what someone might be dreaming about via EEG/fMRI combined with a computer algorithm and using neuroimaging to construct faces. I'm not sure of the implications, if any, but it is interesting nonetheless. 

I think the point is, as a researcher, it is necessary to examine each individual case with an open mind. That it, any one case on its own may be an example of reincarnation, or it may be something for which there are other explanations. That is the only way to do research, surely? It is those who are not open to the possibility who have a more difficult stance to sustain under scrutiny.

I also think each of us have a limited time in this world, why at best I can humor Super Psi explanations but see little point now in indulging every pseudo-skeptic.

But I recognize that's a personal journey, and I realize parapsychologists have a different goal regarding the larger place of all this material within an academic context.

A man who could do arithmetic and math mentally but couldn't read or write numbers. An interesting new neuroscience case:

"The mysterious case of man who can read letters—but not numbers—exposes complex roots of consciousness", at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/...plex-roots .

"This man, known as RFS, is the subject of a new case study that would have made neurologist Oliver Sacks proud. RFS can read words and letters just fine. But as researchers report this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he cannot see numerals at all—at least not consciously. His amazingly specific deficit could help neuroscientists understand how conscious awareness arises in the brain. “What it tells me,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute who specializes in consciousness, “is that … you can get dissociation between cognition and consciousness.”"

Neuroscientists are always quick to make exaggerated or mistaken interpretations of experimental observations. I don't think this case shows anything about the ultimate nature of consciousness.  But it does have something interesting to say about how consciousness when enmeshed in the brain interprets the physical world through visual sense perceptions. This study of a unique case of brain damage seems to show that there is a specialized (presumably very small) region of the brain that interprets visual shapes as numbers and perhaps vice versa. Another part of the brain presumably interprets visually perceived shapes as letters, and so on.

Despite the mental deficit or abnormality, this man still can perform mental arithmetic and other mathematical operations, still can apparently maintain the abstract mental concept of various numbers. It's just that he can't associate these with the visual shapes of the numerical symbols.

This must have some implications as to how perception must be fundamentally different when consciousness, mind, is detached from the physical brain as in a veridical NDE OBE where the physical surroundings of the body are perceived from a spacially displaced location like the corner of the ceiling of the room. Under these conditions there is presumably no perception by the detached entity of light reflections off of surfaces in the room (and no involvement of the brain in interpreting these signals), but instead some other form of perception presumably related to what we know of as clairvoyance, that is interpreted later by the physically embodied entity as the well-known visual sense impressions of recalled human forms, objects, etc.

A man who could do arithmetic and math mentally but couldn't read or write numbers. An interesting new neuroscience case:

"The mysterious case of man who can read letters—but not numbers—exposes complex roots of consciousness", at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/...plex-roots .



Neuroscientists are always quick to make exaggerated or mistaken interpretations of experimental observations. I don't think this case shows anything about the ultimate nature of consciousness.  But it does have something interesting to say about how consciousness when enmeshed in the brain interprets the physical world through visual sense perceptions. This study of a unique case of brain damage seems to show that there is a specialized (presumably very small) region of the brain that interprets visual shapes as numbers and perhaps vice versa. Another part of the brain presumably interprets visually perceived shapes as letters, and so on.

Despite the mental deficit or abnormality, this man still can perform mental arithmetic and other mathematical operations, still can apparently maintain the abstract mental concept of various numbers. It's just that he can't associate these with the visual shapes of the numerical symbols.

This must have some implications as to how perception must be fundamentally different when consciousness, mind, is detached from the physical brain as in a veridical NDE OBE where the physical surroundings of the body are perceived from a spacially displaced location like the corner of the ceiling of the room. Under these conditions there is presumably no perception by the detached entity of light reflections off of surfaces in the room (and no involvement of the brain in interpreting these signals), but instead some other form of perception presumably related to what we know of as clairvoyance, that is interpreted later by the physically embodied entity as the well-known visual sense impressions of recalled human forms, objects, etc.

Interesting that it's the magazine author that seems to make the statements about how 'conscious awareness arises'. I don't understand how this reveals remotely anything about the roots of consciousness at all. Even Koch just says that it allows one to distinguish between cognition and consciousness. 

The study is also remarked as flawed by another neuroscientist who, like me, is 'skeptical of how much we can learn from single case studies'. 

Well...if that's the case...why would you include a misleading title that in no way reflects the research and the opinions of others? This is pure sensationalism, plain and simple.

I've started working on a refutational response to blogger Emil Karlsson's attempt at debunking, refuting and responding to the criticisms of skeptics made by Winston Wu, who I'm sure several of you have probably heard of by this point through Victor Zammit. Emil owns a blog called Debunking Denialism, and he touches on paranormal and parapsychological topics sometimes (although he's sort of stopped touching on these subjects, which he often did in a vague, condescending manner aiming at obvious stuff rather than things skeptics don't like to discuss). He has written four blog posts responding to Wu's points and Karlsson himself seems to be just as, if not moreso, guilty of bias and misunderstanding Wu's points. 

There is a notable claim however that this skeptic makes. He claims that contrary to popular belief, the claim 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' isn't subjective and can be represented via an equation, one I've never seen before and never seen used by any skeptic: 

An extraordinary claim is a claim for which the prior probability, P(H), is extremely low. The prior probability may have some elements of subjectivity, but it can be formulated with respect to prior evidence to mitigate this problem. That is, the prior probability can be seen as the probability of H given prior scientific knowledge. In order for it to be rational to accept a hypothesis H with extremely low prior probability, the evidence needs to be extremely strong for that hypothesis and weak for alternative hypotheses.
   
In other words, the P(E|H)/P(E) ratio has to be extremely large if the P(H) is extremely small (see the size differences in the above expression as a simplified visual explanation). On the other hand, if the evidence is not that impressive for H, then the probability of H on the evidence is low and H should be rejected:
   
In this equation, the prior probability P(H) is low (the claim is more extraordinary) and the P(E|H)/P(H) fraction is also low (the evidence is not extraordinary) and so the posterior probability of H on E (i.e. the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence) is also low and thus H should not be considered credible. Our confidence in H should be very low.

He makes this kind of argument again for Occam's Razor, where he claims it's an objective argument by yet again bringing up some equation I've never seen before. I've never heard of any skeptic actually using mathematical arguments for Occam's razor. 

There are several mathematical arguments for Occam’s razor, but this section will only cover two of them: the conjunction argument and the Bayesian argument. The conjunction argument rests on the basic statistical fact that the more factors you include in a model, the less probable the entire construct becomes (as long as at least one of the extra factors have a probability of less than 1). More formally,

given that at least one of the factors P(B), P(C), …, P(n) is < 1.
P(A) is always going to be larger than the product of P(A) and the additional factors, as long as you admit that those additional factors are not all absolutely true (i.e. have a probability less 1). In other words, a model that just includes A is going to be more probable than a model that includes A, B, C, .., n. Therefore, we should provisionally accept the first model as the most probable one.
Here is how this works in practice: most proponents of the paranormal accept that scientific explanations do play some kind of role, but propose additional explanations because they do not accept that scientific explanations are enough on their own. Because these alleged “explanations” (like extra-sensory perception or demons) have a probability of << 1, their entire model is going to be considerably less probable than the scientific explanation.
Occam’s Razor can also be given a powerful Bayesian justification that rests of the fact that the models with few factors tend to make very precise predictions, whereas complex models can encompass a larger range of predictions. Thus, the simpler model has all of its eggs in one basket, whereas the predictive probability of the complex model is smeared out. In areas where both models apply, the less complex model (the one with fewest additional factors) is going to have a higher P(E|H) and thus a higher posterior probability. This argument is described in additional detail in the book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (webcite) by MacKay (2003). Here is a screenshot of the relevant section:

The falsifiability arguments stems from the fact that simple models are more easily falsifiable than complex models because the simple models applies to more cases and the complex model has more adjustable factors and enables ad hoc escape to a larger degree.

I am fairly certain there is still some degree of subjectivity at play here in these models. Because once again, what is defined as a credible 'scientific' explanation? A skeptical explanation? Well skeptical explanations aren't always rational, as we've seen, and may often rely on speculation. Im detecting a bit of possible hypocrisy here. 

For those interested, here is the first blog post in the four part series: https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/03/2...f-defence/

This guy is apparently active on Twitter, and has a Reddit account he hasn't used apparently in 2 months. He notably has cited RationalWiki before, which is far from a reliable source, and he loves to stereotype and generalise proponents/believers. Someone once commented that hardline skepticism is dogmatic (which is true, hence pseudo-skepticism and anti-skepticism), and he responded by simply missing the point and insisting that scientific skepticism is 'a tool of enquiry' or something.

Anyways, has anyone here heard of these mathematical arguments before? Would you also say there's a certain degree of subjectivity here as well?