Why don't you believe in God?
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Anonymous
| 15:47 here. I'm also the poster who experienced a NDE. I was a theist at the time and it was not a religious experience for me. There was no communication either to or from a god in my experience. When it was time to leave that peaceful place, I said to myself "well, I need to find a way out of this" and was almost instantly back in reality. My path to atheism started in the few years after that experience, actually. |
Anonymous
That's not inducing an OBE, that's making someone feel like they have had an OBE. If you can do in the lab what the PP said was done with the old man and the broken arm, then I'd be convinced. |
Anonymous
Sorry, but this is just magical-thinking. No different than deja vu, or other tricks of cognition. |
Anonymous
Oh, you can say that about blue. But then you would flunk introductory philosophy. We can't prove that our representation of reality is objective. Even if we both say "blue", that does not mean that our mental representation is the same. |
Anonymous
Well that's the point, isn't it? If they couldn't see the scientists manipulating them, they would think they were having an out of body experience, and people like you would claim it is proof of God. But now that a scientist reproduces it, it doesn't seem so special. So it's "on to the broken arm baby". And then onto the next example of paranormal activity, and the next. But as for OBE, this link is just one example. You can put a current across the temporoparietal junction and achieve the same effect. http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/3/550.full Some people on Salvia have out of body experiences. If you want to zap your brain and take salvia, come back and let us know if these did not qualify as "real". |
Anonymous
Possibly. Of course, once you get past introductory philosophy, this kind of sophistry becomes less and less useful. In short, it doesn't matter whether or not our mental representation is "the same". The experience of "blue" is obviously similar enough. Folks who appeal to Philosophy 101 with Freshman dorm claims about how all representations of reality are subjective love the color argument. But why is is that those who propose the swapped colors idea always do so for experiences that lie on a one dimensional scale? What is so holy about shuffling colors inside a spectrum? Why not shuffle all sorts of experiences arbitrarily? Maybe your internal experience of redness is the same as my experience of a low piano note. Maybe your internal experience of watching a soccer game is the same as my experience of watching basketball. Or the same as my experience of wrapping Christmas presents. I hope that this sounds incoherent to you and that you can move step-by-step backwards to the swapped colors idea. The swapped spectrum idea is a glorious mix of guts and timidity. While it boldly denies the physical worlds relevance to what we feel inside, it meekly limits itself to a one-dimensional spectrum, and to the electromagnetic one to boot. The sonic spectrum is too tied to physical events like shaking and vibrations for us to give the idea of a swapped sonic spectrum any creedence, and if one tries to carry the idea beyond the one dimensional spectrum, it rapidly decays into absurdity |
Anonymous
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I'm curious: we've talked above about how God has miraculously intervened in the welfare of sick people. One thing that's always bugged me about this claim: Why is it that God never heals amputees? It's always someone who had a 1% chance of surviving and, lo and behold, they survived!
It's never someone getting a necessary limb back. As the Church Lady used to say, "How convenient!" http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ |
Anonymous
There is a drug called Ketamine that produces all of the elements of an OBE when it is injected into normal, non-dying people. In other words, an OBE is a natural, chemically induced state that the human brain enters. The trigger for an OBE is lack of oxygen to the brain and body. If you read scientific papers like these, you find that there is a completely chemical and completely non-spiritual reason for the features of every OBE. http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/jansen1.html Is this a direct proof that God is imaginary? No. However, it is a direct proof that the OBE (which many people use as "indisputable" proof that God and eternal life exist) has no supernatural meaning. We can scientificaly prove OBEs to be chemical side-effects rather than "a gateway to the afterlife" as many religious believers claim. |
Anonymous
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All fine and good. I agree that simulating OBEs makes it less likely that people are really leaving their body and having experiences. I thought the folks posting the link were attempting to prove that real OBEs could be induced, which would be mind blowing. The OBE that happened this one time at band camp doesn't prove anything, in my view.
On another note, I appear to have won the argument over unicorns. |
Anonymous
| PP, the link discusses NDEs, not OBEs. |
Anonymous
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So you non-believers all think when you die, that is it? What a hopeless life. If you lose a child, you believe it is just lights out and you'll never see him again?
Are you of the jewish faith? Don't they believe that death is the end? |
Anonymous
Is the above 2 separate posters? Death is the end of life. I don't believe in any afterlife. It's just final and inevitable. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the life I am living or love the people I love. It's just an end, not hopeless. |
Anonymous
Well Plato cared. Did he go no farther than Philosophy 101? |
Anonymous
That's called synesthesia, and it exists. |
Anonymous
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