Merged The razor of Hitchens and the Spirits!

Calderaro said:
you need to believe in life after deathone day we will all die
Click to expand...
One does not follow from the other. It is certain that we will all die. However there is no credible evidence that any of the many different formulations of an "afterlife" exist. When you tell us we have to believe in life after death, you have to be specific since there are so many different ideas among animists for what will happen. Some claim reincarnation, some claim ascendence. Which one are you prepared to defend with evidence?
 
JayUtah said:
One does not follow from the other. It is certain that we will all die. However there is no credible evidence that any of the many different formulations of an "afterlife" exist. When you tell us we have to believe in life after death, you have to be specific since there are so many different ideas among animists for what will happen. Some claim reincarnation, some claim ascendence. Which one are you prepared to defend with evidence?
Click to expand...
reincarnation reincarnationthe work carried out by Dr. Ian Stevenson
 
Calderaro said:
reincarnation reincarnationthe work carried out by Dr. Ian Stevenson
Click to expand...
Stevenson's claims and work have been discussed here before. I did a rather deep dive on it, but I doubt I could find the post now. In short, Stevenson's method did a very poor job of controlling for and eliminating other potential causes for the evidence he claims revealed knowledge of past lives. Further, he concentrated his work in regions with a strong cultural belief in reincarnation that provides considerable incentive to publish such claims.
 
May I introduce a Shakespearian tag? "Oh hell, what have we here?"

Well, we have that tired and wheezy old trope about the afterlife. So here's my tired & wheezy old response:

Calderaro ole pal, have you really thought about the implications of an unending existence after bodily death? Try to imagine living forever. Quintillions of aeons would pass, and there you'd still be, playing cosmic solitaire -- and yet, not even the first second of eternity would have elapsed. FOREVER is FOREVER!

The horror of that idea should be enough to drive anyone mad. How're you doing so far?
 
Last edited:
Calderaro said:
why don't you accept anecdotal evidence?
Click to expand...
We do, just not in the way you want or as a substitute for better methods of aggregating data.

As previously stated, the observation portion of anecdotes is almost never rejected in skepticism. What skeptics do differently is to separate the observation from the witness's analysis, interpretation, and attribution. We take at face value what the witness experienced or said he experienced. But when the witness speculates about cause and effect regarding those experiences, we look carefully at the evidence to see whether there is any support.

Science uses anecdotal evidence as hints for things we might want to study more carefully. But even an aggregation of anecdotal evidence is not a substitute for that more careful study because of the possibility of bias (even unconscious bias) and confounding variables. Science is not some magical spell or a substitute for religion. It is merely a set of rules designed to catch and correct the various wrong ways we tend to look at and think about what happens around us.
 
Calderaro said:
Click to expand...
It's very rude to expect people to watch a 40 minute video without identifying what point you think it makes.

The guest is advertised as a scientist, but he is also a Catholic priest. He appears in clerical garb and is clearly intending his remarks for a Catholic Christian audience. It's interesting that you would claim that reincarnation is the evident model of afterlife when the guest you're asking us to accept as an expert affirmatively claims something different. You are not credible when you cherry pick evidence.

The guest prefaces his remarks with attempts to elevate the experience of mind from its obviously subjective roots to the status of evidence. He claims that the intuitive belief in a soul has value as scientific evidence for the existence of a soul. This is not at all scientific. Most of his rhetoric is just a fairly standard Catholic theological exercise. He raises and manipulates topics from a purely religious point of view. While these axioms are likely to appeal to people who already believe in souls, in a larger context they're merely begging the question.

The guest commits the typical mistake of arguing that emergent properties must have an identifiable seat—a fallacy of limited depth. When he finally gets around to talking about physics, it's utter gibberish. He throws around various philosophical conjectures as if they were "laws of physics." And at long last (two thirds of the way into the video) when we get to see his scientific evidence, it's just the standard pop-science treatment of near-death experiences. There's nothing profound or new there. It's the same anecdotes that everyone else invokes, taking them all at face value with little critical commentary.
 
Calderaro said:
This forum allows the use of virtual intelligence
Click to expand...
Yes, it does, if you identify the product you're using and tell us how you're prompting it. You haven't done that, so any use you've made of it so far is outside what the forum allows.

In any case, allowing something doesn't make it a good idea. You say it helps you think, but there's no evidence in your posts that anyone or anything is putting any thinking behind it. You're simply tossing out trite slogans that generally just repeat the same fallacies as everyone before you has used. You don't appear willing to think about why those slogans are unconvincing, and you've manifested your frustration as name-calling.

If you had read the article Pixel42 provided, you would have learned the danger posed by exactly the way in which you propose to use AI. You say you want to use it to "help you think," but the problem of such cognitive offloading is that it prevents you—the human—from learning and thinking about things yourself. And this is exactly the problem we see in your contribution here: you seem unwilling or unable to grasp the content of anything that's said to you, or to participate in any way that goes beyond sloganeering or asking meaningless engagement-continuation questions. Artificial intelligence doesn't make its users smarter.
 
Calderaro said:
reincarnation reincarnationthe work carried out by Dr. Ian Stevenson
Click to expand...

Go on then: defend away.

Just saying "Stevenson" doesn't convince any round here who've looked into him and know that he didn't undertake any scientifically credible work and displayed no apparent knowledge of experimental design and scientific methods (a failing far too common among medics for my liking).
 
This "discussion" is even worse than talking to one of your less bright mates who's just had several lines of Bolivian marching powder and is proceeding to gabble every tosspot idea he has in his head without ever listening to any replies, all the while demanding that you agree with him, but not letting you speak.

That's when it isn't sixth form stoner "philosophy" or like the time I discovered the secret to life, the universe and everything while having a head full of psylocibin, tanked up by several very strong joints and a lashing of cooking sherry.
 
Carrot Flower King said:
This "discussion" is even worse than talking to one of your less bright mates who's just had several lines of Bolivian marching powder and is proceeding to gabble every tosspot idea he has in his head without ever listening to any replies, all the while demanding that you agree with him, but not letting you speak.

That's when it isn't sixth form stoner "philosophy" or like the time I discovered the secret to life, the universe and everything while having a head full of psylocibin, tanked up by several very strong joints and a lashing of cooking sherry.
Click to expand...
This is trendously unfair. OP is from Brazil, not Bolivia.
 
Carrot Flower King said:
Just saying "Stevenson" doesn't convince any round here who've looked into him and know that he didn't undertake any scientifically credible work and displayed no apparent knowledge of experimental design and scientific methods (a failing far too common among medics for my liking).
Click to expand...
Stevenson conducted no extrinsically controlled studies. His evidence is largely anecdotal, but he alleges to have applied stringent enough controls to elevate it to credibility. Upon closer inspection, he did not. As such, his studies carry little weight among similar researchers.

Stevenson accumulated his anecdotes chiefly in geographic and cultural regions such as India that exhibit a strong tradition of belief in reincarnation. Not only is it more commonly accepted where Stevenson did his work, people in his subject pool achieve a higher social status by being able to maintain credible claims of the reincarnation of family members. Not only does this create a bias in favor of such claims, it feeds a desire to manufacture or embellish empirical evidence in favor of it. This arises even outside the interest of foreign scientists.

A properly conducted case study of such claims would have applied controls intended to eliminate such effects as prompting of the subject by other family members and similar kinds of tampering. Stevenson's controls were comically naive, missing even obvious opportunities for prompting. Astoundingly in some cases he even took at face value the hearsay claims of family members regarding what the subject had reported. His misplaced trust in the subjects' families is fatal to his claims.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom