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Are near-death experiences merely illusions ?


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2 minutes ago, papageorge1 said:

So, the question I asked was: Are you suggesting the people in these stories are playing intentional tricks to deceive us?

I am guessing the answer is 'Yes' (or you're avoiding the question?). All the examples you keep giving include intentional tricks and deceptions. For example, are you saying the guy in the OP 'quarter story' intentionally played a fast one on the people there? And from that are we to extrapolate that is what happens every time in all these cases?

Again I must ask:  What is your point? 

The magic and Santa Claus analogies don't apply unless there is an intentional deceiver!!

Ha! Avoiding the question!? Hardly. It was a stupid question. I have no clue if those stories are remotely factual. Let alone the if the events happened exactly as reported. 

But yes. If the stories are accurate then I surmise that deceit played a part in the outcome.

P.S. YOU avoided MY question in the first place!

Do you believe in "real" magic?

Making the Statue of Liberty disappear and reappear? Sawing people in half? Pulling quarters out of people's ears?

I stated my point.

20 minutes ago, onlookerofmayhem said:

The point was that people are easily duped. 

 

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11 minutes ago, onlookerofmayhem said:

 

 If the stories are accurate then I surmise that deceit played a part in the outcome.

 

 

 

From my experience with the human race, my reason tells me in all these near death experience stories 'deceit' likely occurs in only a very small percentage of cases. 

Edited by papageorge1
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Just now, papageorge1 said:

 

From my experience with the human race, my reason tells me in all these near death experience stories deceit likely occurs in only a very small percentage of cases. 

Because that is what you want to believe. 

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2 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Because that is what you want to believe. 

I believe people are basically honest even on mundane experiences.

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21 minutes ago, papageorge1 said:

I believe people are basically honest even on mundane experiences.

I think people are really good at misremembering things, creating false memories, or being prone to suggestion.

I should've gone into advertising. I would've made a fortune...

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3 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

I think people are really good at misremembering things, creating false memories, or being prone to suggestion.

I should've gone into advertising. I would've made a fortune...

But in these OP stories it would be almost impossible to create such ‘correct’ errors.

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32 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Because that is what you want to believe. 

You, of course, are exempted from such pitfalls, by special dispensation, of whom ?

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5 hours ago, papageorge1 said:

I can distinguish facetiousness through the use of reason.

It's not facetious, it's a response to your criticism of people not being 'open-minded' by testing how 'open-minded' you are.

5 hours ago, papageorge1 said:

What decent evidence after the fact could even be expected for 'the quarter' story as a typical example?

Isn't this an admission that 'the quarter story' isn't actually a good one, wouldn't it be better if we had a story that could at least in theory have decent evidence for it?  If we have astral bodies there are countless ways in theory we could have decent evidence for it.  The usual response to specific scenarios where the supernatural could be evidenced is some variation of, 'it doesn't work that way'.  Which, since there's little else to show, has to compete with, 'it doesn't actually exist'.

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2 hours ago, papageorge1 said:

 

From my experience with the human race, my reason tells me in all these near death experience stories 'deceit' likely occurs in only a very small percentage of cases. 

give me an example of how you personally work out what is 'deceit' & what may not be?

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I'd have thought people having been at death's door are not likely suspects to be playing tricks, but in the demented minds of some, "deception is everywhere, at all times".

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Just now, Dejarma said:

yep like god

I think that is an example of being oppressed by an unfounded notion, the "universal trickery", and are you saying God is the Master Trickster ? That would be an example of the ultimate self-oppression, which I guess does sum up the situation with some here.

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Just now, Habitat said:

I think that is an example of being oppressed by an unfounded notion, the "universal trickery", and are you saying God is the Master Trickster ? That would be an example of the ultimate self-oppression, which I guess does sum up the situation with some here.

why did god make me an atheist? 

This fascinates me because the likes of your good self can not answer this question rationally in front of rational thinking folk...

It's also interesting to me that it's such a simple question...

So what's your <logical/ rational> answer to this question?--- i'll enjoy watching you try, as always.... oh what fun;)

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5 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

why did god make me an atheist? 

This fascinates me because the likes of your good self can not answer this question rationally in front of rational thinking folk...

It's also interesting to me that it's such a simple question...

So what's your <logical/ rational> answer to this question?--- i'll enjoy watching you try, as always.... oh what fun;)

Strange question, how could something you say does not exist, make you into something ? The premise(s) appear  to be that you have no input into what you become, and that if there was a God, he'd have made you into a believer. Not safe assumptions, either, I would say. As I say, keep the assumptions to a minimum, that way you won't box yourself in so much.

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1 minute ago, Habitat said:

Strange question, how could something you say does not exist, make you into something ?

it's not a strange question when put to someone who believes god exists!

so i'll ask you again zzzzzzzzzzz:

why did god make me an atheist? what is your personal opinion? why would she/he/it do that?

i luv watching people like you waffle... sad on my part i guess- still, there ya go, it's all good fun init, Habitit :D

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Did you miss the part where I said I make no attributions to God, and I certainly don't speak for other people, let alone some unimaginable God. You many have to reckon with the remote possibility that your atheism is in some small part, at least, your own doing, after all, you don't believe a God could have done it, so who else !

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5 minutes ago, Habitat said:

Did you miss the part where I said I make no attributions to God, and I certainly don't speak for other people, let alone some unimaginable God. You many have to reckon with the remote possibility that your atheism is in some small part, at least, your own doing, after all, you don't believe a God could have done it, so who else !

oh ok then

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14 hours ago, Liquid Gardens said:

I think you are making an assumption about the base assumption here.  It's not a 'base' assumption that what is being reported is incorrect, it's a tentative conclusion from what little evidence, or complete lack thereof, for the idea that it is correct.  It's not like we don't have any facts and history concerning these claims, namely that after decades/centuries and 'thousands' of claims, no one yet has provided any good evidence of anything supernatural.  If someone says there's a real Bigfoot outside in the parking lot, is the base assumption that it is untrue 'wrong'?

I am making an assumption. Unlike other posters who make no such distinction and post opinions, and assumptions, as facts.

If someone said, "I see bigfoot!", I would immediately look. To determine if a bigfoot was there or not. My assumption would not be that there is no such thing and thus no point in looking.

Science should ALWAYS look...

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Then sure, 'someone' watched me teleport, since whether that person is real or not isn't the actual question.  I may be lost on your example though, do you know or did you witness these 'someones' who witnessed and verified these predictions?  Or is that just another unverifiable claim being offered to 'support' the initial unverifiable claim, like I just did with claiming a witness for my teleportation?

It is an unverified claim. If the person is real, that leads a long way to the event being real. If the person is not real....

Thus why I said it is a better question as to if the person who witnessed the event is real, rather then the event itself.

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Perhaps, but faith is usually invoked for religious matters where the religion itself praises/requires one to have faith in order to understand the 'truth'.  That doesn't apply to a lot of supernatural events; no one I know of says you have to have faith in order to believe houses are haunted or to have encounters with ghosts or poltergeists.

True. But without some kind of Belief, those unsupported belief in ghosts is hard to stand by.

Edited by DieChecker
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3 hours ago, Liquid Gardens said:

 

Isn't this an admission that 'the quarter story' isn't actually a good one, wouldn't it be better if we had a story that could at least in theory have decent evidence for it?  If we have astral bodies there are countless ways in theory we could have decent evidence for it.  The usual response to specific scenarios where the supernatural could be evidenced is some variation of, 'it doesn't work that way'.  Which, since there's little else to show, has to compete with, 'it doesn't actually exist'.

Well, my response is that it does indeed work that way and we could have enough cases of anomalous perception like the 'quarter story' to satisfy you if we stopped hearts long enough that permanent death is quite a strong possibility. Otherwise the evidence has to remain anecdotal.

Also I'd argue that in remote viewing cases astral bodies are involved and that gifted subjects have shown fantastic odds against chance.

Edited by papageorge1
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3 hours ago, Dejarma said:

give me an example of how you personally work out what is 'deceit' & what may not be?

We may never know in individual cases. In a significant body of cases we can make assumptions based on our judgment of human nature as we know it.

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16 hours ago, eight bits said:

Working backwards, I'm not getting where the idea of "trick" comes into it. All we have are reports; there's no performance here for us to criticize. One person said something, a second person said that what the first person said was shown to be true. It is self-evident how it is possible for two reports to have been made.

What then is the theory behind the finding of the objects where they were seen? I'd say it is not everyday to find coins in an OR, or to find a shoe on a multistory roof.

I've been in only a few ORs, I grant you, but none if them had coins laying around. Doctors offices, dentists... no coins ever did I notice...

I see hundreds of roofs ever day, yet none with shoes on them.

Not actually ordinary, IMHO.

The objects and places are not unusual, it is that someone reported them who couldn't (shouldnt?) have seen them.

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There is nothing in the reports that logically connects finding an everyday object in an unusual place, looking there because somebody told you to, with anybody's personality surviving death. Nobody died in these stories. That the predicting person was very sick at about the time they think they found out about the unusual location of the object is evidence of what, in your view? Why is this different from an ordinary dream report about coins or shoes turning up in the darnedest places, and by golly, they sometimes do?

I'd tend to agree. The NDE dont prove an afterlife. And may just as well be regular dreams. I am interested in if either can predict/see things the person normally wouldnt/couldnt.

I'd wonder what the statistics are of people dreaming of things in places and then finding the thing was there. I dont ever remember having such a dream myself, though that proves nothing. 

Seems to me that also would be extraordinary, and not common.

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It's not just "dumb luck" that things like this sometimes happen (whether with dreams or other private mental states). What would require divine intervention, IMO, is somehow to orchestrate things so that the riot of disjoint imagery that unspools four or five times a night for just about everybody would never "resemble" anything that occurs the rest of the day.

So... if you had a dream, where you went somewhere you had never been, and found something, say a gold coin, and then you wrote this down when you woke. And then some time later got to that place and found the coin where you had imagined it... that would not be remarkable? Worth noting? Happens all the time?

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3 hours ago, DieChecker said:

The objects and places are not unusual, it is that someone reported them who couldn't (shouldnt?) have seen them.

Well, those objects being in those places is unusual, and that is why we bother to discuss the report.

However it is not prohibitively unusual for somebody to report the location of something accurately without ever having seen the target personally. As I pointed out in one of the earlier posts, for some unknown somebody somewhere, these out-of-place objects are less remarkable than they are for the average person in this discussion. Some tech lost some change (you're in tech, you know techies sometimes drop stuff),  somebody returned from the roof less well shod than when they ascended.

Anecdotes just aren't going to cut it. If you haven't eliminated a candidate explanation by careful experimental design, then it's a candidate. Example: The patient is the person who lost the quarter (the brother, father, best friend, occasional drinking buddy, ... of the person who lost the quarter). The patient's favorite nurse is <any of the above relationships>  of the person who lost the quarter... Information leaks.

What are the odds that any of those is the true explanation?

Compared with what? The odds that an incapacitated man invisibly flew to the top of the room and had a look around?

Damned competitive, I reckon.

3 hours ago, DieChecker said:

So... if you had a dream, where you went somewhere you had never been, and found something, say a gold coin, and then you wrote this down when you woke. And then some time later got to that place and found the coin where you had imagined it... that would not be remarkable? Worth noting? Happens all the time?

Of course. That isn't what we disagree about. We disagree about the next step: weighing candidate explanations for my remarkable find and the role of my dream in finding it.

I'd be thinking how I might have unconsciously inferred something useful about the coin's existence and whereabouts. I'll probably never have a really satisfactory explanation, because whatever it was, it was unconscious, so I don't even know how good an inference it was; all I know is there was some idea in my head that paid off.

What I'd resist is the argument "Well, if you can't explain it, then clearly you left your body, went to where the coin was, detected it there, and then flew back."

I hope you wouldn't argue that, but you seem attracted to just that when severe illness or injury is added to the mix.

Edited by eight bits
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59 minutes ago, eight bits said:

I hope you wouldn't argue that, but you seem attracted to just that when severe illness or injury is added to the mix.

Actually no. I dont believe in ghosts or leaving your body and flying around. I do find the reports interesting though.

:tu:

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10 hours ago, papageorge1 said:

Well, my response is that it does indeed work that way and we could have enough cases of anomalous perception like the 'quarter story' to satisfy you if we stopped hearts long enough that permanent death is quite a strong possibility. Otherwise the evidence has to remain anecdotal.

Also I'd argue that in remote viewing cases astral bodies are involved and that gifted subjects have shown fantastic odds against chance.

I agree that NDEs are difficult to provide evidence for, seeing as everyone involved should instead be focused on making sure that the situation stays only 'near' death.  I'm glad you brought up remote viewing though, as I was going to raise the criticism that in just about every human endeavor I can think of, at least for things that are real, some humans consistently can perform better than others either through talent or expertise.  Who are these gifted subjects who have shown fantastic odds against chance, who is the Mozart of remote viewers and specifically what can they do?  Remote viewing in principle should be effortless to prove, yet science seems to be oblivious to these gifted subjects.  Why is that?

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3 hours ago, DieChecker said:

Actually no. I dont believe in ghosts or leaving your body and flying around. I do find the reports interesting though.

:tu:

But you believe in God?

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