Proof of Immortality, the IV league

[abaddon]

and PhD-level nurse Penny Sartori have examined more generally whether NDErs’ descriptions of resuscitation procedures are, on average, more correct than the descriptions of cardiac patients who have not had NDEs.

What descriptions did patients who had no NDE provide?

Confirmation bias at it's peak.

Personally, I have been "under" several times. Did I have any NDE's? Nope. Not a one. Never.

Why exactly do I not count? Why exactly do the vast majority of people who experience nothing not count? Why exactly do only the anecdotes of those minority who do claim to experience something count? Why do the known effects of deep anaesthesia not count?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

...except it's not. It's about something called NDE's...which are subjective experiences.

It's not about the subjective experience of NDEs, it's about what's objectively happening when people subjectively experience NDEs.

What does 'objective' mean when it's still your 'subjective' doing the experiencing.

That's exactly what the scientific method exists for - to eliminate the subjective.

 

[MRC_Hans]

...except it's not. It's about something called NDE's...which are subjective experiences.

No, it is not. Granted, the thread started LONG ago, but the title is plain to see: "Proof of Immortality". Note the word Proof.

Jabba has tried to rally the subjective experiences called NDE's as such proof, and we all tell him they are subjective, and hence not proof. Thank you for supporting us.

Now, if you want to discuss subjective evidence as a subject in itself, I suggest you start a thread for the purpose.

Hans

 

[Nonpareil]

It's not about the subjective experience of NDEs, it's about what's objectively happening when people subjectively experience NDEs.

[distant sound of annnnoid's head exploding]

 

[annnnoid]

They might be. They might not be.

...right...so what you just wrote in that post is not actually what you meant to write in that post.

<SNIP>

Edited by Locknar: 

SNIPed, breach of rule 0, rule 12.

 

[annnnoid]

Nobody here is disputing that you can get information about subjective experience by asking people to describe their subjective experience

...if that is your conclusion then you simply have not been reading the posts. I can grab a pile of quotes that flatly claim that anecdotes (descriptions of subjective experiences) are evidence of absolutely nothing!

Nobody here seems to want to accept the blindingly simple fact that anecdotes (aka: what you call a description of a subjective experience) describe subjective experiences.

…but we’ll keep things real simple so that everyone can follow along.

Question #1: When someone describes their subjective experience…does that qualify as an anecdote, a personal account, a self-report?

Question #2: Does it really matter what specific word you use to describe what you call “ a description of a subjective experience”….? That is the meaning…so that is what we are talking about. Someone communicates / describes their thoughts, feelings, experiences on anything under the sun (your post qualifies as just such a thing).

…is that communication / description evidence of those thoughts / feelings?

You have just answered a resounding ‘yes’ to that question. If someone is describing their thoughts / feelings / experiences…then that description is evidence of those thoughts / feelings / experiences.

Thus…by default and definition…this description / anecdote / whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it has evidential qualities (which is precisely what a great many of the posts on this thread refuse to acknowledge).

Is the statement: “I just ate some cheese.”…evidence that I just ate some cheese?
Is the statement: “I feel sick.” …evidence that I feel sick?
Is the statement: “I love my wife.”…evidence that I love my wife?
Is the statement: “I disagree with you.” …evidence that I disagree with you?
Is the statement: “My computer does not work.”…evidence that my computer does not work?
Is the statement: “I understand particle physics.” …evidence that I understand particle physics?
Is the statement: “I despise Trump.”…evidence that I despise Trump?
Is the statement: “I have a million dollars in my bank.”…evidence that I have a million dollars in my bank?
Is the statement: “I just experienced an NDE.”…evidence that I just experienced an NDE?


Only a complete idiot would insist that ‘no’ is the answer to the first eight questions…so why is the ninth question suddenly different????

...and if you're still convinced that anecdotes have no evidentiary legitimacy...then take your ass down to your nearest law court and discover what is happening when someone is sitting in the witness box and describing their thoughts / feelings / experiences. The entire judicial system would collapse this moment if anecdotal evidence had no relevance...

...and we even have one of you who claims to be a practicing lawyer who has argued in support of this nonsense!

 

[annnnoid]

Nobody here is disputing that you can get information about subjective experience by asking people to describe their subjective experience. Everyone here is disputing Jabba's claim that subjective descriptions of NDEs are objective support for his claim of immortal souls.

To summarize…if…as you claim…it is possible to get information (aka: EVIDENCE) about subjective experience by having someone describe that subjective experience (aka: an anecdote)…

…you have just argued that the anecdote in question IS evidence.

 

[JayUtah]

...discover what is happening when someone is sitting in the witness box and describing their thoughts / feelings / experiences.

What is your formal qualification in law?

A lay witness may testify only to what he senses with his natural senses, and to a limited extent provide a non-expert opinion that is rationally connected to his sensory knowledge and perhaps illustrative of it. He may not draw conclusions about what he saw and heard. He may not wax emotional about his subjective feelings regarding what he saw and heard. And then a nice man from the other side of the controversy gets up and asks a series of questions designed to test the strength of that testimony. Eyewitness testimony subject to cross-examination in court is not anecdotal evidence. It also isn't scientific evidence.

 

[Nonpareil]

...if that is your conclusion then you simply have not been reading the posts. I can grab a pile of quotes that flatly claim that anecdotes (descriptions of subjective experiences) are evidence of absolutely nothing!

Yes, we all know that you don't actually read for comprehension, annnnoid. You don't have to keep repeating itself.

Nobody here seems to want to accept the blindingly simple fact that anecdotes (aka: what you call a description of a subjective experience) describe subjective experiences.

No, we all understand that.

They simply fail, completely and utterly, to have any necessary connection with what is actually true.

Only a complete idiot would insist that ‘no’ is the answer to the first eight questions…so why is the ninth question suddenly different????

It isn't. As we have been saying.

What you cannot do, however, and what you are trying to do, is leap from "I just had a near-death experience" to "this is evidence that there is X supernatural thing occurring".

 

[abaddon]

Is the statement: “I just ate some cheese.”…evidence that I just ate some cheese?

Unevidenced claim.

Is the statement: “I feel sick.” …evidence that I feel sick?

Unevidenced claim.

Is the statement: “I love my wife.”…evidence that I love my wife?

Unevidenced claim.

Is the statement: “I disagree with you.” …evidence that I disagree with you?

Your posts constitute evidence that you disagree with everyone.

Is the statement: “My computer does not work.”…evidence that my computer does not work?

Nope. We have evidence that your computer does work. If it didn't, you could not post at all. Therefore you must have access to a working computer.

Is the statement: “I understand particle physics.” …evidence that I understand particle physics?

Nope. Because you clearly do not.

Is the statement: “I despise Trump.”…evidence that I despise Trump?

Nope.

Is the statement: “I have a million dollars in my bank.”…evidence that I have a million dollars in my bank?

Nope.

Is the statement: “I just experienced an NDE.”…evidence that I just experienced an NDE?

Nope.

Only a complete idiot would insist that ‘no’ is the answer to the first eight questions…so why is the ninth question suddenly different????

It isn't. The answer is still no.

...and if you're still convinced that anecdotes have no evidentiary legitimacy...then take your ass down to your nearest law court and discover what is happening when someone is sitting in the witness box and describing their thoughts / feelings / experiences. The entire judicial system would collapse this moment if anecdotal evidence had no relevance...

This thread is predicated on mathematical proof of immortality. It is not predicated on courts or laws or anything else.

...and we even have one of you who claims to be a practicing lawyer who has argued in support of this nonsense!

Law =/= Science. Get used to it.

 

[Hokulele]

Question #1: When someone describes their subjective experience…does that qualify as an anecdote, a personal account, a self-report?

That would entirely depend on the circumstances. If the description were elicited by a competent researcher as part of a broader study, with controls put in place to ensure that all relevant information is captured, and irrelevant information is noted appropriately, it can be a part of a case study.

If it is not so controlled, nor professionally gathered, it is simply a "cool story, bro".

 

[Loss Leader]

Well, call me an idiot but:

Is the statement: “I just ate some cheese.”…evidence that I just ate some cheese?
Is the statement: “I feel sick.” …evidence that I feel sick?
Is the statement: “My computer does not work.”…evidence that my computer does not work?
Is the statement: “I have a million dollars in my bank.”…evidence that I have a million dollars in my bank?

No. At least, they're not scientific evidence. They could be falsified, but have not been. I would label them anecdotes indicating a need for further study.

Is the statement: “I understand particle physics.” …evidence that I understand particle physics?
Is the statement: “I love my wife.”…evidence that I love my wife?
Is the statement: “I despise Trump.”…evidence that I despise Trump?

I'd categorize these as undefined. I doubt they have a truth value because the highlighted words have no working definitions. I certainly don't despise Trump the way I despise my wife. Anecdotes that may never grow up to be facts.

Is the statement: “I disagree with you.” …evidence that I disagree with you?

A bit of both - disagree isn't a strong word and the facts could falsify this. They're anecdotes.

Is the statement: “I just experienced an NDE.”…evidence that I just experienced an NDE?

No. Rather than report a set of sensory perceptions (which could be falsified), this is a conclusion. A conclusion must necessarily follow from facts. There are no facts here. (I am assuming you mean "NDE" in the paranormal sense. Otherwise that word is underfined and a truth value cannot be assigned until it is.)

...and if you're still convinced that anecdotes have no evidentiary legitimacy...then take your ass down to your nearest law court and discover what is happening when someone is sitting in the witness box and describing their thoughts / feelings / experiences. The entire judicial system would collapse this moment if anecdotal evidence had no relevance...

...and we even have one of you who claims to be a practicing lawyer who has argued in support of this nonsense!

Well, that's because you're wrong. I promise that if you were right, I'd agree with you.

Your mistake seems to be grounded in irrelevancy. The burden of proof required in regular life is next to none. You're trying to force us to pretend we demand scientific evidence to get through the day. We don't. The brain takes logical shortcuts. Most notably, it will believe friends and vaguely distrust strangers. If my mother says, "The soup is great," I'm having soup. If a waitress says it, I might not be convinced.

But that's not what we're doing here. We're doing formal logic and/or science. That requires a much stricter level of evidence.

As to the level of proof in court cases, we don't accept anecdotes straight out. Otherwise, we'd have to let go every criminal who says he didn't do it and (somehow) lock up every defendant who the police say did it. In law, we look for falsifiable evidence. Anecdotes, through cross-examination, are given some evidentiary weight between zero and 1 by the jury. But what juries really like is a nice fingerprint, DNA, security footage, etc. These are falsifiable and count for quite a lot.

But why is witness testimony acceptable at all in law? Simply, we don't have anything better. This is the closest to falsification we can. And it's not to establish something as inarguably true. It's only to establish that something is likely enough to be true that we can feel confident punishing one person.

And I'll add this caveat: The judicial system is far from perfect, innocent people are convicted and even executed, and the well-told story still holds too much sway.

But as far as scientific or logical proof, the concept of "love" is undefined and, as such, has no truth value.

 

[JoeMorgue]

"Subjective" is not a magic word that you can invoke to turn evidenceless nonsense into something we can't question no matter how much Woo Slingers like to use it that way.

I get that the big "Gotcha" being clumsingly setup here is to equate a statement of internal emotional states like "Love" to "I saw a bright light when close to death therefore there's the exact concept of God my particular mythology believes in and btw I'm totally immortal and you can't question it you big cold skeptic meanie" but that's nonsense.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

...right...so what you just wrote in that post is not actually what you meant to write in that post.

Edited by jsfisher: 

<snip> Moderated content redacted.

I love my wife. True or not?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I certainly don't despise Trump the way I despise my wife.

I'm assuming you meant to type "love"? You love Trump and despise your wife.

 

[Belz...]

Nobody here seems to want to accept the blindingly simple fact that anecdotes (aka: what you call a description of a subjective experience) describe subjective experiences.

I seriously doubt that anyone here disputes that.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Your mistake seems to be grounded in irrelevancy. The burden of proof required in regular life is next to none. You're trying to force us to pretend we demand scientific evidence to get through the day. We don't. The brain takes logical shortcuts. Most notably, it will believe friends and vaguely distrust strangers. If my mother says, "The soup is great," I'm having soup. If a waitress says it, I might not be convinced.

This is another common "gotcha" Woo Slingers try to set up, that if you don't make a big show out of proving water is wet via a double blind lab pier reviewed study that starts at the Big Bang and re-proves every thing step by step up to the viscosity of bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms prior to every single time you stick a toe in the bath you're making some tacit admission that science doesn't work because you didn't use their strawman version of it in that case.

Woo Slingers (and sadly more reasonable people as well far too often) deeply need to maintain this illusion that science is only labcoats and beakers and everything else is some mystical tribal woo knowledge us big mean skeptics are just too proud to admit we use.

Which is all nonsense. Not seeing the need to go through the formal steps of scientific rigor for claims that are some mixture of already proven, statistically unlikely to be false, or actually subjective (not Woo-woo "I just don't feel like defending my nonsense so I'll call it subjective" subjective) doesn't mean we are secretly admitting that "science doesn't work" or abandoning the concept. I just means that the time and effort to question things is a finite resource that we aren't wasting on inconsequentialities.

And honestly there is zero in the concept of science that requires it to be so damn formal. As xkcd put it "Ideas are tested by experimentation. Everything else is just bookkeeping."

Everyone here operates in the same way 99.9999% of the time regardless of how you label the methodology. You observe, you experiment (even if you don't call it that) and you adjust your worldview accordingly.

If you want to walk across the street you stage an experiment to see if a car is coming. Sure the "experiment" might be "Look left and right" (and we could quibble over the exact definition of "experiment" if we want to waste time talking about something that doesn't matter) but semantics aside (and please aside for all time) it's the same base concept. We need to know something so we use a method which we know gives a high probability of an accurate representation of that "something." That's science by any reasonable definition. Just because you aren't doing a 6 month long study on whether or not a car is coming doesn't make it Woo.

Alternative ways of obtaining information don't work so they aren't used. They are only trotted out in abstraction, to affect this same old tired "Science doesn't know everything neener neener neener" routine we see so often here.

Religious people don't pray that a car isn't coming, they look. Determinist still look both ways. Solipsistic navel gazers still look both ways.

If we want to talk about tacit admissions everyone here makes a billion tactic admissions that science and only science works for every outside stimuli they react to throughout the day.

 

[Loss Leader]

I'm assuming you meant to type "love"? You love Trump and despise your wife.

I'm with one of them now, so I can't talk.

 

[Nonpareil]

This is another common "gotcha" Woo Slingers try to set up, that if you don't make a big show out of proving water is wet via a double blind lab pier reviewed study that starts at the Big Bang and re-proves every thing step by step up to the viscosity of bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms prior to every single time you stick a toe in the bath you're making some tacit admission that science doesn't work because you didn't use their strawman version of it in that case.

And this is another running theme with annnnoid, despite having this pointed out multiple times over multiple threads in the past. His earlier mention of a disagreement with PixyMisa was down to the same thing.

The science we employ in day-to-day life is trivial - it is simple and basic and generally has no need to progress beyond things like "how doors work" and "this is a cat" - but it is there nonetheless.

 

[zooterkin]

I'm with one of them now, so I can't talk.

There's a Dr Freud here who would like to have a word...