Personal Musings on NDE Desperation

I agree however that the 'desperation' works both ways. I've read many comments from people who don't like the idea of a afterlife and thus are desperate in hoping there isn't one (though often this may be due to the belief in strictly Heaven and Hell). I understand that. The wishful thinking argument was always a weak one because it works both ways. 

This has led to a lot of more militant materialists/atheists and pseudo-skeptics trying to speak on behalf of not just 'scientists', but 'science' itself, especially neuroscience and physics, on something presumably non-physical and transcendent, even metaphysical. At the time of writing this I've already seen some examples on the AwareofAWARE blog with two commenters recently claiming that 'all the evidence points to nonexistence after death' or something like that. How on earth they can comment things like that with presumed confidence on THAT blog is beyond me. You can have an opinion of course, but just admit it when you're expressing one. 

Edit: That, and I can't stand people who try and imply that all the doctors and scientists who are proponents on the subject of NDEs are attention-seeking frauds. I've often heard the same thing said about NDErs. Sure, the NDERF website apparently does have some copycat anecdotes and there have been controversies around bestselling books about NDEs. But does that mean most of them are fraudulent? No, it doesn't. It baffles me how some can admit to accepting the existence of NDEs but denying that there have been ones verified by medical professionals that still remain unexplained.

I agree however that the 'desperation' works both ways. I've read many comments from people who don't like the idea of a afterlife and thus are desperate in hoping there isn't one (though often this may be due to the belief in strictly Heaven and Hell). I understand that. The wishful thinking argument was always a weak one because it works both ways. 

This has led to a lot of more militant materialists/atheists and pseudo-skeptics trying to speak on behalf of not just 'scientists', but 'science' itself, especially neuroscience and physics, on something presumably non-physical and transcendent, even metaphysical. At the time of writing this I've already seen some examples on the AwareofAWARE blog with two commenters recently claiming that 'all the evidence points to nonexistence after death' or something like that. How on earth they can comment things like that with presumed confidence on THAT blog is beyond me. You can have an opinion of course, but just admit it when you're expressing one. 

Awareofaware is another fair example of the type of people I mean, everyone in the comments there seem to be incredibly paranoid and skittish. If a dissenting voice comes in, or a vague study comes out to instill a hint of doubt, everyone gets really hostile and nervous like the whole house has come crumbling down. The Ketamine study that was posted there about sheep was certainly interesting, near 0 EEG because of the drug while the sheep is still alive is interesting, but no end of the world.

It's one of the reasons I joined this forum, and the responses here really exemplify what I mean, we've got opinions about stuff, but we aren't desperate.

To some other stuff that was said, I wouldn't dare ask you to stop posting NDEs Tim, not at all what I meant. Would be like asking IANDs to stop keeping records cause they do it too much. 

For Sudduth, I think he gets a bad rap. I certainly don't agree with him, but Sudduth's opinions towards the afterlife more come from philosophical opinions about things like how the concept of the self works, though he's not opposed to survival, he just doesnt think its convincing enough so far.

Please keep posting Tim, it's much appreciated.

Thanks!

For Sudduth, I think he gets a bad rap. I certainly don't agree with him, but Sudduth's opinions towards the afterlife more come from philosophical opinions about things like how the concept of the self works, though he's not opposed to survival, he just doesnt think its convincing enough so far.

I've seen people have run ins with him, including Michael Prescott and Bernardo Kastrup, and he comes off as a crank.

But that's my opinion of the man - I'd be curious if Titus or anyone of the NDE guys have talked to him.

I've seen people have run ins with him, including Michael Prescott and Bernardo Kastrup, and he comes off as a crank.

But that's my opinion of the man - I'd be curious if Titus or anyone of the NDE guys have talked to him.

Definitely got an attitude that's for sure. His back and forth with Titus was definitely a thing, alongside the one with Kastrup.

Definitely got an attitude that's for sure. His back and forth with Titus was definitely a thing, alongside the one with Kastrup.

Ah so he has had a run in with Titus as well. Any chance you have a link handy, or does it come up in Self Does Not Die?

Sudduth, IIRC, is a believer in Vedanta - I believe he expects us to unify with the cosmic Awareness. I recall he's also said he favors Super Psi and thinks that was the PK moving stuff around in a haunted house experience he had.

https://www.titusrivas.nl/public/articles/read/883

He did a review of Sudduth's book on critiques of philosophical positions for survival.

http://michaelsudduth.com/personal-refle...ter-death/

Sudduth has put a post up on his blog describing his own survival position. It's actually very interesting. His position is more one wondering about WHAT exactly survives, and if that might enough to be 'me' when I die, or if it'll be so different that it wouldn't actually count as person survival. I highly recommend reading it, at the very least to understand his true personal position. He's definitely not a, materialist, PSI is real but survival is bad kinda person.

https://www.titusrivas.nl/public/articles/read/883

He did a review of Sudduth's book on critiques of philosophical positions for survival.

http://michaelsudduth.com/personal-refle...ter-death/

Sudduth has put a post up on his blog describing his own survival position. It's actually very interesting. His position is more one wondering about WHAT exactly survives, and if that might enough to be 'me' when I die, or if it'll be so different that it wouldn't actually count as person survival. I highly recommend reading it, at the very least to understand his true personal position. He's definitely not a, materialist, PSI is real but survival is bad kinda person.

Ah ok so he's agnostic...but his reasoning is akin to Braude's yet Braude has a clarity that doesn't feel like gaming the math:

However, retrospectively, the more important issue I raised in the latter two articles was the role of auxiliary assumptions for the explanatory/predictive power (and hence testability) of the survival hypothesis. This evolved into the central issue in my forthcoming Philosophical Critique – the problem of auxiliary assumptions. Roughly stated, auxiliary assumptions are required in empirical arguments for survival, but this proves self-defeating for these arguments in their classical formulations, and my proposed formalizations of the classical arguments as Likelihood and Bayesian arguments render more perspicuous why the arguments are unsuccessful. Furthermore, the problem of auxiliaries further illuminates the perennial survival vs. living-agent psi debate. Given my central argument, it’s not that the appeal to living-agent psychic functioning (e.g. telepathy, clairvoyance) is a good counter-explanation of empirical data allegedly suggestive of life after death. It’s that the survival hypothesis is an exceedingly poor explanation (and untestable hypothesis), and one of its devastating and self-defeating flaws is that it opens wide the door to various exotic non-survival counter-explanations of the data.  Not only are survivalists unable to adequately rule out such exotic counter-explanations, the internal “logic” of survival arguments implicitly sanctions them.

There was also his whole argument with Kastrup, which was just bizarre.

A teacher of philosophy called Michael Sudduth has written a blog post criticizing what I say, in my book Brief Peeks Beyond, about Sam Harris' attack on Eben Alexander. Let me admit upfront that I had never heard of Michael Sudduth, have no idea who he is beyond what I found in a quick google search, and know nothing of his work. I will explain at the end of this essay why I nonetheless decided to comment on his criticism.

In fact, Sudduth doesn't dispute—let alone defeat—the real substance of any of my arguments. So why this mismatch between what is alleged in the beginning of his post and what one actually finds when one reads it through? It's a lot of fit & fury amounting to nearly nothing at the end. A lot of noisy but empty posturing.

Sudduth is so focused on hair-splitting the philosophical minutiae that he seems to completely lose sight of the big picture. To say that debunking the transcendent nature of Alexander's NDE was not Harris' intent seems extraordinarily ingenuous to me, if not outright stupid. But is mere naiveté the explanation here? Or are there other possible motivations for Sudduth's charade? What motivated all the unsubstantiated disparaging in his post? I can only speculate.

Please keep posting Tim, it's much appreciated.

Thanks!

There's no need (anyone), but much appreciated anyway.

I've sen two varieties of denial or support on both sides. Legitimate and illegitimate

Legitimate stuff focuses on the direct evidence or lack thereof.

Illegitimate is pure emotion. On the proponent side its more or less just a desire for their to be some sort of a structure to existence, presumably because reality is so terrible that people want to believe that it can't really be the way it appears.

On the skeptic side the illegitimate stuff seems to focus far more on what seems to be a defence mechanism around learned helplessness. It appears to me that some skeptics have married themselves to the idea of having no real power or choice in life as a sort of subtle stockholm syndrome. And when someone comes along with evidence that PSI might be real and life might not end with bodily death, it threatens that worldview and the emotional investment they've put into telling themselves they're helpless. I think it might make some feel like, if its true, then it reflects badly on them since they could've been more than they are if they'd only tried, so they reject the idea to protect their emotions.

The best summation in my opinion is J. Michael Straczynski's idea of The Tyranny of Reasonable Voices:



My anxiety around NDE's is far more than just whether life continues or not. for the most part I couldn't care less about that. For me its because there's a whole story behind my existence, supposedly. An estimated 45,000+ years of conscious experience, largely involving a certain group of people, all the ups and downs,good times and bad times and all the stuff I've learned over time is on the line. And worst of all, that entire story could be true and still have absolutely nothing to do with me specifically. The memories themselves show how it could all just be something else I just picked up on. So all the work I've done trying to rebuild magic from the memories could work, yet prove nothing. I very much wish all I had to worry about was whether death was final or not. And I wish my past life story was as simple as drowning in a lake 100 years ago or similar. Really I wish the paranormal had never entered my life at all, since its destroyed it more than my blindness ever could. Unfortunately I'm not so lucky. And though I'm very confident due to the evidence I've either gathered or had forced on me that the story is true, I still have doubts occasionally.

The doubts focus on the fact that the people I and my one incarnated friend from that group have had contact with should be 100% capable of simply phasing into reality as beings just as solid as the rest of us.... yet they haven't. Sure a couple have shown up as apparitions in the past and sure they've done many other things, but I can never get over the fact that they just don't show the fuck up physically when I know they could. Their reasons for it seem overly convenient even if they are totally plausible and rational... if true.

This has only been exasperated thanks to interviews like this, talking about spirits solidifying so much that doctors could take their pulse:



It's only gotten worse since they told me, explicitly, a number of months ago, that they were going to stop talking to me because they wanted me to go socialize with people down here for awhile to re learn how to do that. I feel pretty abandoned since I'm trying to figure out all this emotional stuff and really need their help with it,