Why dualism?

[Thor 2]

What is it with people promoting paranormal beliefs and lack of understanding of burden of proof?

Believers in all kinds of woo have this same difficulty. Throw in a couple of testimonials, and loudly shout "prove me wrong" is a standard approach, that goes with the turf of being a believer.

 

[annnnoid]

Can you point to the part of that debate where Carroll or Novella said anything of the sort?

Carroll has explicitly stated that science knows enough about what stuff is and how it works to explicitly exclude the possibility of life after death and / or OBE’s / NED’s.
IOW…consciousness apart from a brain is not possible.

…and you can stop wasting your time with the …”oh but look what he says in this retarded video or this retarded video or this retarded video…” I’ve seen a bunch of them and I’m quite familiar with his overall argument and I have no interest in wasting my time watching any more of his garbage. He’s nothing more than and ignorant, arrogant, bigot. Many of his positions are garbage and can very easily be demonstrated to be exactly that.

Carroll was agreeing with Novella, who repeatedly stressed that published neuroscience has long shown that researchers can produce very similar experiences by a whole variety of means inc. drugs, starving the brain of blood &/or oxygen, electrical stimulation etc.

Do you ever consider wasting your time actually figuring this stuff out for yourself????

How is it possible to establish that ‘similar experiences’ are being generated when it is not even remotely possible to even begin to empirically adjudicate such events????

It was very clear that Novella & Carroll were saying the exact opposite of what you just claimed.

Lets get that first point of yours out of the way before I spend any time reading your other claims.

Please listen to what Novella says between 33min.30sec to 40min (that just 6.5 mins of film), where he clearly and repeatedly stresses that the established scientific position is that the brain is effectively the mind, and that comes from mountains of evidence going back over a century.

I see…so because he says it, therefore it must be true.

…consider perhaps the possibility of thinking for yourself!

I suppose it is a waste of time to point out that no one…not anyone anywhere anyhow, has the faintest clue what the ‘mind’ even is! There is nothing remotely resembling an empirical description of or definition for this thing….and no one has the slightest capacity to empirically adjudicate it. Nor does there exist anything remotely resembling a definitive theory of mind.

…not to mention…that our understanding of the brain and how it works is, at best, rudimentary.

So with all this massive ignorance…how is it possible to not only make such a definitive statement…but prove it!?!?!?

…especially given the additionally indisputable fact that no one has a clue how the physical activity of the brain actually creates this thing we call the ‘mind’ in the first place!

IOW…Novella is an idiot…and your argument is garbage!

…you can very easily demonstrate that this position is correct by simply providing us with an empirical definition of ‘mind’. When you’ve done with that, you can provide us with an empirical description of how the brain produces it.

…this would give you a lock on the next Nobel prize since there isn’t a scientist on the planet who can even begin to do either of these things at the moment.

To the point where today in neuroscience we can reproduce every single aspect of any NDE by simple processes such as starving the brain of oxygen and/or blood supply, and also by directly "switching" on or off various circuits within the brain. That's what Novella said.

Critical thinking just isn’t your strong point is it!

….like I said earlier…science does not have the ability to even begin to empirically adjudicate such an event…so how is it possible to definitively establish that any single aspect…let alone EVERY single aspect…has been reproduced!?!?!?!?

He also stresses in that short part of the film, that although there are many anecdotal stories and compelling sounding narratives told by all sorts of patients about NDE, and whilst such patients do undoubtedly experience unusual mind activity as a result of their brain damage, in fact there has never been any properly documented case of such mental activity when the brain is actually dead.

…and does he waste any time pointing out why this may be the case? Of course not. That would diminish the drama wouldn’t it. Who cares about facts!

I mean….it couldn’t possibly have something to do with the fact that it’s utterly impossible to empirically adjudicate these events in the first place!

Please review that 6 min section of the film, and tell us clearly which of those statements from Novella you are disputing.

I’d rather watch paint dry!

So ... just review that piece of the film, and tell us which of Novella's claims about the published science and it's conclusion that the mind is essentially the brain, is untrue.

….sure…if you want to actually come up with something resembling an answer to those questions I included above. I really couldn’t care less what ‘science’ says. What I care about is what the evidence says. The evidence says…by a very very very wide margin… that we don’t know what the mind is and we don’t know how it is created.

Feel free to give links to properly published genuine science research papers where any genuine scientists claim to have shown that a disembodied mind continues to function without a brain.

I never said there was any such thing. I’ve simply stated that there is lots of evidence that implicates such things and there is absolutely NO science that definitively excludes them. You’re the ones who keep throwing around these stupid arguments that ‘science has proved this and that and this and that and we KNOW these things CANNOT happen!’

….prove it.

Annnnoid should watch the whole of that talk by Carroll. And he should probably pay with his own money to buy a copy of Carroll's book (which that Google talk comes from). That way he could quite easily learn why real scinece shows that he is wrong to believe in paranormal phenomena such as human minds functioning with a brain.[/I]

Real science doesn’t show that I’m wrong. Real science doesn’t show anything. That book is actually quite interesting cause it quite clearly shows where Carroll is wrong. He plays his little games…and he thinks he is winning, but he very blatantly and unilaterally moves the goalposts all over the place to preserve his pathetic argument.

…guess what happens when the goalposts don’t get moved? Carroll loses….but that’s an argument for another time.

Again, I can only suggest that you listen to the talk that you're attempting to discredit, because what you're posting doesn't have anything to do with it. If you want to offer some actual counter-arguments, then I'll happily listen.

IOW…you don’t have a clue how to respond to these arguments (like usual) so the best tactic is to pretend that you can actually argue that they’re irrelevant…without ever having to actually argue that they’re irrelevant.

Now, I'm sure there are counterpoints which can be offered to that talk (and, indeed, I have seen people in the past offer them), but that we can't know what is unknown, or talking about small effects, or dark matter, or bleating on about the lack of definition of "consciousness" are counterpoints. They are, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, thoroughly addressed in the talk itself.

You have seriously got to be kidding me!!!!

…this entire thread is about the phenomenology of consciousness and the events that occur within it…but suddenly it’s irrelevant!!!!

Is English not your first language by any chance?????

What Carroll is saying is only what all genuine scientists should say (and it's what Novella also said repeatedly in that debate) - what Carroll "assumes" is that scientifically valid and properly gathered and examined material evidence, is the most reliable method we currently have for determining what is likely to be true vs. what is unlikely to be true.

….bullllll-*****!

Anyone with any more than a fraction of a brain understands that science is most indisputably NOT the only method of determining what is…or is not ‘true’.

There are huge areas of reality over which science has little or no capacity to adjudicate veracity (Carroll actually admits this…one of many contradictions he fails at reconciling). The fact that so many here are so massively ignorant of these indisputable facts is….typical.

….denial it’s called.

 

[Thor 2]

Carroll has explicitly stated that science knows enough about what stuff is and how it works to explicitly exclude the possibility of life after death and / or OBE’s / NED’s.
IOW…consciousness apart from a brain is not possible.

…and you can stop wasting your time with the …”oh but look what he says in this retarded video or this retarded video or this retarded video…” I’ve seen a bunch of them and I’m quite familiar with his overall argument and I have no interest in wasting my time watching any more of his garbage. He’s nothing more than and ignorant, arrogant, bigot. Many of his positions are garbage and can very easily be demonstrated to be exactly that.




Do you ever consider wasting your time actually figuring this stuff out for yourself????
How is it possible to establish that ‘similar experiences’ are being generated when it is not even remotely possible to even begin to empirically adjudicate such events????



I see…so because he says it, therefore it must be true.

…consider perhaps the possibility of thinking for yourself!

I suppose it is a waste of time to point out that no one…not anyone anywhere anyhow, has the faintest clue what the ‘mind’ even is! There is nothing remotely resembling an empirical description of or definition for this thing….and no one has the slightest capacity to empirically adjudicate it. Nor does there exist anything remotely resembling a definitive theory of mind.

…not to mention…that our understanding of the brain and how it works is, at best, rudimentary.

So with all this massive ignorance…how is it possible to not only make such a definitive statement…but prove it!?!?!?

…especially given the additionally indisputable fact that no one has a clue how the physical activity of the brain actually creates this thing we call the ‘mind’ in the first place!

IOW…Novella is an idiot…and your argument is garbage!

…you can very easily demonstrate that this position is correct by simply providing us with an empirical definition of ‘mind’. When you’ve done with that, you can provide us with an empirical description of how the brain produces it.

…this would give you a lock on the next Nobel prize since there isn’t a scientist on the planet who can even begin to do either of these things at the moment.




Critical thinking just isn’t your strong point is it!
….like I said earlier…science does not have the ability to even begin to empirically adjudicate such an event…so how is it possible to definitively establish that any single aspect…let alone EVERY single aspect…has been reproduced!?!?!?!?




…and does he waste any time pointing out why this may be the case? Of course not. That would diminish the drama wouldn’t it. Who cares about facts!

I mean….it couldn’t possibly have something to do with the fact that it’s utterly impossible to empirically adjudicate these events in the first place!




I’d rather watch paint dry!




….sure…if you want to actually come up with something resembling an answer to those questions I included above. I really couldn’t care less what ‘science’ says. What I care about is what the evidence says. The evidence says…by a very very very wide margin… that we don’t know what the mind is and we don’t know how it is created.




I never said there was any such thing. I’ve simply stated that there is lots of evidence that implicates such things and there is absolutely NO science that definitively excludes them. You’re the ones who keep throwing around these stupid arguments that ‘science has proved this and that and this and that and we KNOW these things CANNOT happen!’

….prove it.




Real science doesn’t show that I’m wrong. Real science doesn’t show anything. That book is actually quite interesting cause it quite clearly shows where Carroll is wrong. He plays his little games…and he thinks he is winning, but he very blatantly and unilaterally moves the goalposts all over the place to preserve his pathetic argument.

…guess what happens when the goalposts don’t get moved? Carroll loses….but that’s an argument for another time.




IOW…you don’t have a clue how to respond to these arguments (like usual) so the best tactic is to pretend that you can actually argue that they’re irrelevant…without ever having to actually argue that they’re irrelevant.




You have seriously got to be kidding me!!!!

…this entire thread is about the phenomenology of consciousness and the events that occur within it…but suddenly it’s irrelevant!!!!

Is English not your first language by any chance?????




….bullllll-*****!

Anyone with any more than a fraction of a brain understands that science is most indisputably NOT the only method of determining what is…or is not ‘true’.

There are huge areas of reality over which science has little or no capacity to adjudicate veracity (Carroll actually admits this…one of many contradictions he fails at reconciling). The fact that so many here are so massively ignorant of these indisputable facts is….typical.

….denial it’s called.

Might I humbly suggest annnnoid that your debating style could use some refinement. I have highlighted a couple of bits to illustrate this. Slandering someone is not a good look and the excessive use of punctuation does nothing to strengthen your argument.

The worst mistake you make however is the last one I highlighted - insulting your adversary. From my observation IanS seems to have an exceptional grasp of written English.

 

[annnnoid]

Might I humbly suggest annnnoid that your debating style could use some refinement. I have highlighted a couple of bits to illustrate this. Slandering someone is not a good look and the excessive use of punctuation does nothing to strengthen your argument.

The worst mistake you make however is the last one I highlighted - insulting your adversary. From my observation IanS seems to have an exceptional grasp of written English.

Over-reaction to dumb arguments. That was a response to Squeegee I believe, but you're right anyway.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

IOW…you don’t have a clue how to respond to these arguments (like usual) so the best tactic is to pretend that you can actually argue that they’re irrelevant…without ever having to actually argue that they’re irrelevant.

No, you don't need to re-phrase what I've said, as what I said was both clear and what I intended to say. Everything you've said in this thread which has purported to be a counter-argument to Carroll's stance has either already been thoroughly addressed by Carroll, or is utterly irrelevant to it. And now you admit that you refuse to even listen to what it is he's saying.

If you want to make some actual counter-arguments to what he's saying, then that's what you need to do. You will not badger me into validating your straw man version of what he's actually said, or defending arguments that have not been made.

 

[IanS]

Carroll has explicitly stated that science knows enough about what stuff is and how it works to explicitly exclude the possibility of life after death and / or OBE’s / NED’s.
IOW…consciousness apart from a brain is not possible.

…and you can stop wasting your time with the …”oh but look what he says in this retarded video or this retarded video or this retarded video…” I’ve seen a bunch of them and I’m quite familiar with his overall argument and I have no interest in wasting my time watching any more of his garbage. He’s nothing more than and ignorant, arrogant, bigot. Many of his positions are garbage and can very easily be demonstrated to be exactly that.

...
... <snipped to exclude all the rest of the same repeated empty claims>
...

annnnoid - I have not bothered to read any of your reply beyond that very sentence above, because we are still wainting for you to show the answer to your previous claim where you said "Carroll’s claim boils down to this: That there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE's / OBE’s"
My question to you (which I will quote again to you below), was (and still is) to ask you - "Can you point to the part of that debate where Carroll or Novella said anything of the sort?" ...

... can you please do that ... please quote from that video where Carroll or Novella say "there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE’s / OBE’s".

Here to remind you is how I already asked you to produce from the video an example of where Carroll makes that claim which you accused him of -

Carroll’s claim boils down to this: That there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE’s / OBE’s etc., and that if they were to occur they would be detectable. This is utter garbage…especially for a qualified physicist (thus I question his credibility…with good reason).
.

Can you point to the part of that debate where Carroll or Novella said anything of the sort?

Carroll was agreeing with Novella, who repeatedly stressed that published neuroscience has long shown that researchers can produce very similar experiences by a whole variety of means inc. drugs, starving the brain of blood &/or oxygen, electrical stimulation etc.

It was very clear that Novella & Carroll were saying the exact opposite of what you just claimed.

Lets get that first point of yours out of the way before I spend any time reading your other claims.

 

[annnnoid]

No, you don't need to re-phrase what I've said, as what I said was both clear and what I intended to say. Everything you've said in this thread which has purported to be a counter-argument to Carroll's stance has either already been thoroughly addressed by Carroll, or is utterly irrelevant to it. And now you admit that you refuse to even listen to what it is he's saying.

If you want to make some actual counter-arguments to what he's saying, then that's what you need to do. You will not badger me into validating your straw man version of what he's actually said, or defending arguments that have not been made.

I have listened to what he’s said. It is specifically and explicitly addressed both in that paragraph and in the rest of what I’ve written.

…to which you have responded with nothing more than: “…that’s all irrelevant and look at this video or that video cause I don’t really know what I’m talking about…”

…which is just fine. This is complicated stuff and lots of people don’t understand it. But if you don’t understand it then don’t go pretending that you do!

You now have two choices. You can either produce some kind of argument that doesn’t resort to ‘look at the video cause I can’t be bothered to figure stuff out for myself’… or you can be put on ignore. It’s not a threat…I simply can’t be bothered wasting my time with stupid arguments.

annnnoid - I have not bothered to read any of your reply beyond that very sentence above, because we are still wainting for you to show the answer to your previous claim where you said "Carroll’s claim boils down to this: That there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE's / OBE’s"
My question to you (which I will quote again to you below), was (and still is) to ask you - "Can you point to the part of that debate where Carroll or Novella said anything of the sort?" ...

... can you please do that ... please quote from that video where Carroll or Novella say "there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE’s / OBE’s".

Here to remind you is how I already asked you to produce from the video an example of where Carroll makes that claim which you accused him of -

…does it occur to you that there may be other videos? By golly…I did actually point out that very thing!!!!!!

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I have listened to what he’s said.

Perhaps it would be beneficial, then, if you were to state what you believe his argument actually to be. And by that, I mean tell me what area of physics he's talking about, and what it is that he says about that particular area of physics that precludes the possibility of consciousness existing outside of the brain. To sum it up you shouldn't need more than 3 or 4 sentences.

If you can do that accurately, I'll agree that you do understand his argument, and I'll answer anything you like.

 

[IanS]

…does it occur to you that there may be other videos? By golly…I did actually point out that very thing!!!!!!

But you were replying about the video debate that I posted, i.e. this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0YtL5eiBYw


And in the very next post (no other intervening posts to complicate what anyone was referring to), you posted a direct reply (quoting the whole of my post) in which your very first line of reply was to say the following -

Carroll’s claim boils down to this: That there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE’s / OBE’s etc., and that if they were to occur they would be detectable. This is utter garbage…especially for a qualified physicist (thus I question his credibility…with good reason).

So you were most definitely talking about what Carroll said in that particular video (not what he might have ever said at some other time in some other place).

And what I said to you about that very first remark of yours (which is highlighted above in bold), is that I don't recall him saying any such thing. And I pointed out to you that it was Novella who was the one mainly replying on that point of what Neuroscience now "knows" about patients reports of NDE's, and that unsurprisingly Carroll was not disagreeing with what Novella had said about it.

What Novella said, and what Carroll agreed with, is that in fact medical science has long ago, and many times, reported and discussed the detection of brain activity (by MRI scans and the like) displayed when a patient reports a so-called NDE. Explaining that, Novella also said that they can now reproduce the same sort of images in the patients brain by a variety of quite simple means such as starving the brain of blood &/or oxygen, drug treatments, electrical manipulation etc.

I do not know if Novella is correct to say that, because I myself have not been personally involved in any such medical or neuroscience research, and I have not read the papers describing those experiments. And I did not try tell you that I had ever examined any such brain research myself. Instead what I pointed out to you was that when in the film the moderator asked their opponents if they disagreed with Novella, iirc (and I used that same caution of saying "iirc" when saying this to you before) their opponents did not so much dispute what Novella had said, but instead claimed they too had published "scientific" evidence showing that human conciousness does in fact persist after the person dies.

However, as they were making that claim, the moderator asked them to explain which research evidence they were using, and after some moments hesitation & prevarication they suggested a book of some 800 pages in which several authors said to be experienced medics and "scientists" (of some sort? what sort?) declared their acceptance of such claims of conciousness surviving after death ... asked what the basis of the authors belief was, they then admitted that it was a combination of believing anecdotal stories from various patients who claimed NDE's, together with the authors accounts of how they had interviewed psychics and mediums who had convinced them that they were able to contact the spirit world!

On the issue of Sean Carroll possibly saying that he knows anything as a matter of absolute certainty from established theories in science - after that particular video (ie the link above), there have been at least 3 others linked here, and I've watched at least the entirety of two of those (the other two that I linked), as well as several other videos of Carroll talking about quantum theory in general, and I did not notice in any of those videos Carroll ever claiming that "there is no known medium or mechanism that could account for NDE’s / OBE’s etc., and that if they were to occur they would be detectable". As I say, on the contrary, Carroll knows from Novella, if not from his own research (which is generally nothing whatsoever to do with neuroscience), that NDE episodes are not only detectable, but are apparently reproducible in what iirc Novella said was "exact detail"; so Carroll knows that perfectly well, and he did not disagree with that when Novella was saying it.

Most scientists are usually extremely careful to point out that since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920's, we cannot really ever say that anything that physically happens in this universe was, or is, a literally "certainty", as a 100% "fact". So in serious discussions, most genuine research scientists, and particularly theoretical physicists like Sean Carroll, are usually very careful to avoid saying that their results are a matter of absolute literal "certainty". Although, of course in more general conversation and as a matter of expediency they may use phrases such as "we know X, Y, Z", when they really mean we think X, Y, Z are definitely true because the evidence is overwhelming.

Richard Dawkins for example often says "evolution is a literal fact". Personally I would not say that even about the evidence for evolution. But as far as I can tell, the likelihood of evolution being completely wrong, is billions-to-one against ... because the evidence is now completely overwhelming.

Similarly, in one of those other videos, Sean Carroll did address the specific point of what science can or cannot establish as a "fact", and the nearest he came there to asserting an absolute "certainty" was to say that some of our present knowledge of the universe is not ever going to be entirely discarded in the future, although it may very well be improved and altered etc. And he gave the example of saying that the table in front of him was always going to be known as being composed of what we now call "atoms", and that would also be the case a million years from now (he said), but what probably will change and what has already changed a great deal in the last 100 years since the discovery of sub-atomic particles, is our understanding of the best way to describe what "atoms" actually are; their properties, the number of sub-particles, their representation as "fields" etc.

But in saying that, it was obvious from his phrasing, that even there Carroll was expressing his own personal opinion about whether in a million years time science would still have any notion of "atoms".

 

[IanS]

By the way, as some here will have probably noticed; there is another thread on this issue of NDE, God and the "afterlife", started just yesterday by a theist poster/member named Maartenn. Where I notice that by page 4 Maartenn has descended to the point of rejecting science as our best way of investigating claims that NDE is an example of human conciousness persisting after death and in fact God's way of revealing himself to the patient. He says we should rely instead on personal testimony and anecdotal accounts.

In the video which I linked where Sean Carroll and Steven Novella are debating against Eben Alexander and Raymond Moody, near the end of the discussion Moody similarly says that we should not use science to investigate his claim that conciousness persists after death. He says that science will not provide the answers, and that instead we should rely on anecdotal evidence and what he calls "critical thinking".

Frankly, anyone who is still taking this stuff seriously after the believing side has admitted that they are forced to reject objective science, cannot be thinking straight, to put it kindly.

Here is Maartenn's post in the other thread -

Science asks for physical evidence. But a spiritual realm, when it exists, can not provide us any physical evidence for its existence.

You have to use other methods to find out the truth. You have to be like a police inspector or a judge who also seek for the truth. Our whole legal system depends on their methods. You need to validate the reports or eyewitness testimonies. (anecdotical evidence)

Revelations, reports of visions, lucid dreams, anecdoctical evidence, analogy, metaphors etc. These are your new tools of knowledge about the spiritual realm. But of course: you must be capable of investigating these revelations in a meaningful way. How do you seperate the information from the noise? That's the question.

Forget your science. It's useless here. Use the method of the detective and the police inspector or the judge to find out the truth about the existence of a spiritual realm. Investigate the testimonies of the hundreds of people.

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Archives/NDERF_NDEs.htm

Every day there are new people with their stories.

 

[LarryS]

I'm not following this other thread, and I'm not particularly interested in NDE's, but in this context when folks suggest that we should not be dependent on 'science' - maybe what they mean we should not depend or count on the 'hard sciences' such as physics, chemistry and etc.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I'm not following this other thread, and I'm not particularly interested in NDE's, but in this context when folks suggest that we should not be dependent on 'science' - maybe what they mean we should not depend or count on the 'hard sciences' such as physics, chemistry and etc.

Nope, explicitly that we should disregard science and instead rely on anecdotes. Well, unless there's an isolated scientist or part of a research paper which can be quote-mined or twisted to support the spiritual explanation, in which case science is very valid.

 

[Navigator]

I don't see how science can be used for such a purpose. If it could, then it would.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I don't see how science can be used for such a purpose. If it could, then it would.

Surely it has been? It's just that no reliable evidence of the paranormal has been found.

 

[Dancing David]

I don't see how science can be used for such a purpose. If it could, then it would.

The methods of science apply to all areas....

 

[Mark6]

*sigh*

There is no evidence that there is no afterlife.

Likewise, there is no evidence that there is no:

Middle Earth

Klingon Homeworld

Leprechans

Vampires

Invisible dragons

Sentient lifeforms in Earth's magma

Stable isotopes of plutonium

Etc.

Are you prepared to act as if all of the above might exist? After all, nobody proved they do not?

 

[Thor 2]

Originally Posted by Navigator View Post
*sigh*

There is no evidence that there is no afterlife.

Likewise, there is no evidence that there is no:

Middle Earth

Klingon Homeworld

Leprechans

Vampires

Invisible dragons

Sentient lifeforms in Earth's magma

Stable isotopes of plutonium

Etc.

Are you prepared to act as if all of the above might exist? After all, nobody proved they do not?

It doesn't seem to matter how many times it's pointed out to wooists, that the burden of proof is on them, they still come up with this.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Because it's easy. Just make up something up. You can always create a special pleading excuse as to why you can't be proven wrong.

 

[annnnoid]

I’m not gonna bother with this any more. What you folks need to do is some basic investigation:

Go have a look at the different varieties of neural scanning and the spatial and temporal limits they inevitably encounter.

Go have a look at what is actually known (and what isn’t) about how the brain works and the incredible densities of material that are involved (far beyond anything any variety of neural scanning can even begin to adjudicate).

Go have a look at what is known about the actual relationship between the physical activity of the brain and consciousness (…nothing…no need to waste too much time there).

Go have a look at what is actually known about the phenomenology of consciousness (…again…nothing).

Go have a look at what is empirically known about human nature (very very very very little).

Go have a look at how robust cognitive theory is (…it isn’t…nothing remotely resembling anything definitive).

Your arguments are, basically, crap! What is sad is the degree to which you all seem so eager to believe your crap.

What it boils down to…is that Carroll is wrong. Period. He’s said that we know enough about enough to UNCONDITIONALLY exclude the possibility of consciousness occurring apart from a physical brain (…newsflash: THE SPECIFIC VIDEO DOES NOT MATTER…WHAT MATTERS IS THAT THIS IS WHAT HE HAS SAID!!!!). This means life after death, NDE’s, OBE’s, and any number of other anomalous events CANNOT HAPPEN ...according to Carroll (no if’s, and’s, but’s, or maybe’s).

He’s wrong. There is no way we even begin to know enough to make such a vast claim! That paragraph explains some of the actual physics about why he’s wrong. I’ve explained some of the areas of cognitive science that demonstrate that he’s wrong.

So far not one of you has come anywhere close to coming up with any kind of coherent response. Until you do…sayonara.

Nope, explicitly that we should disregard science and instead rely on anecdotes.

…but Squeegee….this is exactly what YOU and every other skeptic does just about every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade that you will live on this planet.

You do not resort to any variety of science to adjudicate your existence, you…and everyone else (including just about every scientist alive or who ever has been) resort just about exclusively to anecdotal evidence.

…so…for upwards of 99% of your existence…you utterly disregard science and rely exclusively on something that you constantly argue is worthless.

Like I said…your reasoning is laughable.

The methods of science apply to all areas....

…not according to Carroll.

…and they may theoretically apply to all areas but they most certainly are not even remotely functional in all areas.

 

[annnnoid]

Likewise, there is no evidence that there is no:

Middle Earth

Klingon Homeworld

Leprechans

Vampires

Invisible dragons

Sentient lifeforms in Earth's magma

Stable isotopes of plutonium

Etc.

Are you prepared to act as if all of the above might exist? After all, nobody proved they do not?

I constantly wonder why it is so agonizingly necessary to constantly point out the blindingly obvious:

There is no reasonable evidence of Middle Earth, the Klingon Homeworld,
Leprechans, Vampires, Invisible dragons, Sentient lifeforms in Earth's magma, or stable isotopes of plutonium.

There is, on the other hand, LOTS of evidence of life after death.

Until it can be empirically demonstrated that this evidence is fraudulent or implicates something other than life after death...then it remains as evidence.