When a hypothesis is offered to explain something there usually is some time lag between the submission of the hypothesis and proof positive. It might be a short time lag or it could be thousands of years.
And, until such evidence is forthcoming, the hypothesis is dismissed. As soon as evidence is found, it's accepted. What's your point?
If one rejects a hypothesis because there is no published peer review in support of the hypothesis, that doesn't make the hypothesis errant. It just means there isn't proof.
Right. But, without evidence, the only logical conclusion is that it's false. Science deals with fact, not speculation. Someone might have hypothesized the existence of black holes years before any evidence of them was actually found, but until such evidence
was found, the hypothesis was dismissed.
Opinions can be revised. It's not hard to do. But until you find evidence, the only logical conclusion is to dismiss it.
One can opt to wait for proof before giving any credence to the implications of the hypothesis
In other words, dismiss it until evidence is forthcoming, which is what I was talking about.
or one can opt to explore the implications.
Which is fine, if you can find someone who's willing and able to explore those. And if that exploration happens to turn up evidence, great; you now have a reason for others to accept the hypothesis. But if it doesn't, then it should be rejected even more strongly than it was before.
This is where it becomes a practical problem rather than a philosophical one. Given infinite man-hours and resources, skeptics
would test every claim. But we don't have infinite man-hours. We have to pick and choose what we spend our time on, so we go with the things which look most likely to have some positive results - i.e., those which have at least some supporting evidence. Those which don't can still be explored if you can find someone with the money, time, and desire, of course, but you still can't say that it's logical to accept the hypothesis without evidence, and you certainly can't say that it's still worth exploring after your search turns up nothing - unless you later find some new method of investigating, of course, or some new piece of evidence which suggests that you should look again.
In short, it's great to say "hey, we should check this out", but you still have to have evidence before anyone accepts it, and you can't blame someone for refusing to accept it if you lack that evidence. That's doubly true if people have looked for the evidence already and found nothing.
If everyone chose the former approach, then scientific exploration would come to a standstill.
Not really. Knowledge tends to lead to more knowledge. But that's not really relevant to this discussion, as I explained above. In the end, you still have to be able to produce the evidence.
In some ways that is what I'm doing. I want to explore for my own interests the ramifications of an eternal consciousness (or at least a consciousness that can extend beyond the limited life of my physical body).
Exploring its ramifications is rather pointless when you haven't yet established that such a thing even exists. It's nothing but navel-gazing.
I'm achieving some things that are very satisfying to me.
I'm very happy that you find baseless speculation so fulfilling, but you really shouldn't come to a skeptics' forum and expect to get anything other than demands for evidence to support the existence of such a thing.
If you want to talk about what things would be like if such a thing did hypothetically exist - in other words, without having to post any evidence - go and start a thread in the Philosophy section saying "I want to talk about what things would be like assuming that consciousness is not limited to the brain". Even then, you'll probably get a lot of people saying that it's a pointless discussion, because it is, but you won't have to deal with people demanding evidence.
Some people in this conversation seem to be in agreement with me that there may not be a reductive materialist explanation for experiences people are having.
Those people are wrong.
If people's anecdotes are not evidence, perhaps we don't share the same definition of evidence.
Apparently not. And yours is wrong.
No offense meant, but that's really all there is to it. Anecdotes are not evidence. Period.
An NDE with components that can't be explained as an extension of a waking realilty seems to me to be evidence that something else must be brought forward to explain the NDE.
Firstly, you've yet to produce any account of an alleged NDE which can't be explained as a dream or hallucination. Secondly, if you had, you'd still have to prove that said NDE actually took place as described.
That's why anecdotes aren't evidence. Memory is fallible, confirmation bias is very real, and the human mind is just not good at recall.
I would agree that anecdotes don't prove anything.
Then they aren't evidence.
Pixel -how do you interpret the study that investigated blind people's NDEs?
Can you link me to this study? I don't think you've done so yet, but I could be wrong.
It occurred to me that this conversation about NDEs won't ever go anywhere because it can't be proved under the current environment (lack of testing capability in a really controlled setting).
Actually, it can be tested. Not with one hundred percent accuracy, of course, but it can. And it has been. There have been several studies on reports of NDEs, none of which have turned up any evidence supporting the idea that they're anything more than dreams or hallucinations.
Most people would say that a spoon cannot be bent unless some physical force is applied to it. Yet there is a program at the Monroe Institute called MC2 that teaches people how to do that without applying force.
And no evidence that said course actually works.
What are the odds of this being true and capable of being observed in a controlled setting? 1,000 to 1? Higher?
Much higher. Somewhere very near "impossible", in fact, because said trick has been investigated under controlled conditions hundreds of times and has never once been shown to be anything more than just that: a trick.
Infinite because it can't be done? Anyone willing to take the 50 to 1 odds? If I put up $1,000, would there be a skeptic or a pool of doubters who would pool $50,000 to have a shot at splitting my $1,000? If so, perhaps I could suggest a methodology for testing that would be acceptable.
I don't want to add any money to add to the pool, but the methodology of such a thing is simple. Put a man in a room with a spoon (a
new spoon, provided by the testing committee and not so much as shown to the testee beforehand) on a table in front of him. Don't allow him to "apply force" to the spoon. See if he can bend it.
