Do you believe in life after death?

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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Tue Oct 01, 2013 1:48 pm

Well, Dash, my late grandfather had a NDE - I haven't seen or heard anything to suggest that it was anything more meaningful than a dream. I'd LOVE to, but I haven't. Now, if someone on here has had a NDE and believes it's proof of an afterlife, or has inherent faith in a deity and thinks that's proof of an afterlife, I'm not going to insult that, because I choose to be respectful of others' beliefs. But the title of the thread is "Do YOU believe in life after death?" and nothing I've ever encountered has ever given me cause to believe or even to think "well maybe so".
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DashaBlade » Tue Oct 01, 2013 2:05 pm

I get ya.

See, my mother had an NDE, and a lot of people have tried to convince her that it was bullshit. I find that highly disrespectful - sort of like saying, "Just because I've never ridden a bus, it means you've never ridden a bus" or something.

My paternal grandmother also had one when she was young and almost drowned. She told me the story, and I thought it sounded cool. My grandma wasn't remotely religious, and in fact it was in part due to the NDE that she wasn't, because before that her family had subscribed to the belief that you had to toe the dogma to get into Heaven, and she saw it and was already somewhat skeptical about the religious stuff before it happened, so she figured that it was more of an "everybody gets in" situation.

I've never had one myself, but I've also never eaten a tiger or driven a dump truck. I do happen to believe, however, that we are defined by a collection of our experiences, both individually and shared, so the dump truck driver and the tiger-eater and the person who's seen angels are all cool with me.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DamianaRaven » Tue Oct 01, 2013 2:39 pm

DashaBlade wrote:I do happen to believe, however, that we are defined by a collection of our experiences, both individually and shared, so the dump truck driver and the tiger-eater and the person who's seen angels are all cool with me.


I like that perspective. I think it's possible that our "individual" awarenesses (OK, spell-check, what is the plural of awareness... so shut up, then.) are part of a single consciousness that is divided into every living thing, not unlike a child that's playing with dolls. The dolls know only as much as the kid wants them to. I believe that everything is inextricably connected to everything else and we're all part of the same life force. I couldn't possibly be me unless you were you, so it's just as likely that I will become everyone when I die as it is that I'll be nobody. In fact, both could be accurate - without this clumsy bag of mostly water, I would literally be "no body," but my life energy could scatter about, being absorbed by all and thus making me everyone.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby 52xMax » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:56 pm

Not to trivialize NDEs, or to call people who went through that kind of experience a liar, but there's been plenty of studies which indicate it all happens in the brain. There's no coming back from brain death, so it's fair to say there's no indication of anything supernatural going on during clinical death, though we are still not very clear on what actually happens during those experiences. But there's something to be said about people from different religions experiencing their own versions of the afterlife before being brought back, as well as non-religious people filling that gap with all kinds of visions too.

There was a recent experiment where lab rats were induced cardiac arrests and the EEGs displayed "a surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with consciousness and visual activation, exceeding even levels seen during normal awake states". Make what you want out of this, but if you're the type who believes in heaven, you better hope there's good pest control up there and the rats won't infest your cloud.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:08 pm

I like Dash and Damiana's idea of us being part of a larger consciousness. It would be pretty to think so, and it's sort of the closest I can get to belief in some kind of afterlife, but it's doesn't feel true - it's feels like I'm lying to myself.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DashaBlade » Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:22 pm

It's not even so much a larger consciousness. It's more like, something happens to me and I tell you about it. Now you've shared in my experience. Even if I die you'll be around and can tell the story to someone else, sharing the experience with them.

It's not a mystical thing. It's the foundation of human society. If not for people passing their stories and experiences along, we'd have no such a thing as history. We'd have no such thing as progress, because we'd have nobody else's mistakes to learn from.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby 52xMax » Wed Oct 02, 2013 12:14 am

This is a more general point, and it might be a bit off-topic, but I wanted to add my two cents to the side-discussion about beliefs.

The thing about believing is that it's not a process you can control. You can't choose to believe or not believe in something. You take the information that's given to you, and depending on the level of trust of that source, you either take it at face value or with a grain of salt. You are already predisposed to your beliefs, in the sense that there are some things you're gonna question, and some others you won't put under the same standards of scrutiny, for many different reasons.

This is where faith and doubt come into the equation, as flip sides of the same coin, which is trust. But you don't get to decide how much trust you put into things, because it depends on your cumulative formation, knowledge, experience, and personality.

Taking "a leap of faith" will work for those who want to believe or are already leaning in that direction. They may have doubts and questions, but they either ignore them diving deeper in belief, or actively engage them trying to disprove them, not always succeeding, and often resulting in even more questions.

For people with a more inquisitive nature, faith just won't cut it, because doubt is not a voice whispering from afar, it's screaming in their ears with a megaphone, so they will question everything, even when it's something they agree in the first place, because that's their nature.

Obviously, there's a lot of middle ground, and my guess is that most people fall somewhere in between this Mulder-Scully scale. The funny thing is that all of us can be guilty of being both at the same time. We poke holes at some things we disagree with, while ignoring the exact same holes on things we like, or we just take them for facts without really analyzing them. Just being aware of this behavior can go a long way into reaching common understanding with people who hold different points of view.

That being said, given the choice to consciously make myself believe something that doesn't hold water only because it's comforting, or remain in uncertainty?... well, I'll take the truth, no matter how horrible it might be, over a pleasant lie any day of the week.

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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Oct 02, 2013 12:25 am

I don't know that it's true that you can't choose what to believe, but regardless, I find it helps to define a strict standard of evidence, and believe things that meet that standard of evidence. If you define that standard scientifically, you're less likely to believe things that are wrong and you're less likely to have logical inconsistencies in your beliefs.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Wed Oct 02, 2013 12:32 am

I absolutely think it's true that you can't choose what to believe. I would be a great deal happier (or at least less neurotic ) if I believed in an afterlife, but I literally CANNOT choose to. I've actually tried. I realise that for many people (certainly Max and probably aviel, for example), the desire to willingly delude myself must seem a very strange one.

Here's an interesting question, or at least I think so. For aviel and the other non-believers, what would your standard of proof be for the existence of an afterlife?

For those of you who believe in an afterlife of whatever kind, what would it take to convince you that there is none?
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Oct 02, 2013 1:14 am

OrangeEyebrows wrote: For aviel and the other non-believers, what would your standard of proof be for the existence of an afterlife?

If it were substantiated by scientific evidence. My standards of evidence are the same for everything: if I am to believe in it, it must have been empirically demonstrated. I may have inclinations to certain ideas that I suspect might be true based on weaker evidence, but if I'm to actually believe something, it has to be proven scientifically (or, I suppose, deductively in the case where the truth of premises is irrelevant).
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He tested with Turing,
his circuits fried during,
and now we'll have peace for a spell.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Wed Oct 02, 2013 1:21 am

I understand that, but can you give me a specific "what-if" scenario? F'rexample, if I saw a fairy, I still wouldn't believe in them, because I'd consider it more likely that my brain was on the fritz. So for me, my own empirical observations wouldn't cut the mustard.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Oct 02, 2013 1:25 am

OrangeEyebrows wrote:I understand that, but can you give me a specific "what-if" scenario? F'rexample, if I saw a fairy, I still wouldn't believe in them, because I'd consider it more likely that my brain was on the fritz. So for me, my own empirical observations wouldn't cut the mustard.

The scientific standard of evidence doesn't consider anecdotes like that, so obviously that wouldn't qualify. The evidence would have to be published in a peer review journal, and the experiment would have to be repeated with similar results.
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Terry Pratchett wrote:The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

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He tested with Turing,
his circuits fried during,
and now we'll have peace for a spell.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Wed Oct 02, 2013 1:31 am

Okay, so for you it would be an experiment whose conclusions could be replicated (which yes, I realise is basically the definition of "scientific evidence", I'm just sort of clarifying for myself). So...a number of individuals whose knowledge of past lives could not have been gained in their current life? Would that do it? Or those experiments where they put pictures of dongs on top of furniture and then see whether people spot them during NDEs? (I'm assuming it's pictures of dongs, since that's what I'd do). Because what I guess we're both saying is that if God himself stepped down from a cloud and announced to the people of the world that there is life after death, we'd dismiss that as not being rigorous enough proof.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby w00 » Wed Oct 02, 2013 1:45 am

OrangeEyebrows wrote:I understand that, but can you give me a specific "what-if" scenario?

How about an ouija board type of device that produces answers from dead people that can be independently verified, repeatedly? That might do the trick for me.

An example might be, "what's in your diary that's locked in a safe that we don't have the key to? Ok, now, where did you hide the key so we can check that?"


OrangeEyebrows wrote:F'rexample, if I saw a fairy, I still wouldn't believe in them, because I'd consider it more likely that my brain was on the fritz. So for me, my own empirical observations wouldn't cut the mustard.

This is my thought exactly, and you've phrased it better than I could.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DamianaRaven » Wed Oct 02, 2013 1:46 am

How would one construct the experimental parameters for the empirical demonstration you speak of? If, for example, you were to insist that I prove "purple umbrella milkshake," I could bring you a purple, opened upside-down umbrella full of milkshake. Then I'd probably make you eat it, 'cause 'it'd be rude and ign'rant not to. I happen to agree with your instant dismissal of "life after death" on the grounds of pure semantics, so shall we call it post-life sentience? We are such dumb, tiny, weak, and limited little things... but knowing that opens up all sorts of wild possibilities. Thinking and experimenting upon it could be a major game-changer.

Wanna go ghost-hunting with me someday?
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