As for Lommel, again, you never posted any of his evidence or argumentation. For all I know, he's a quack. I'm not going to take time out of my day to read an entire book, as I'm not arguing for consciousness existing outside of the body. If he has good arguments, post them — Philosophim
'During night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He was found in coma about 30 minutes before in a meadow. When we go to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the ‘crash cart.’ After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. The moment he sees me he says: ‘O, that nurse knows where my dentures are.’ I am very, very surprised. Then the patient elucidates: ‘You were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath, and there you put my teeth.’ I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. It appeared that the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with the CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself.'
No doubt, @Wayfarer, you accidently missed this request.And I've long argued that if an individual life is understood as part of a continuum extending before physical birth that has consequences beyond physical death, that this can provide a framework within which the life beyond is at least conceivable.
— Wayfarer
Okay, so make the case – a sound argument – for this alleged "continuum" ... Once the facts of the matter are established, then we can interpret their philosophical ramifications (and, maybe, derive cogent, metaphysical conclusions). :chin: — 180 Proof
Parsimony be damned, the principle of explosion (& effect of other "obvious" fallacies) always ... works in mysterious ways. :pray:The obvious implication of my argument is that there’s intelligence (consciousness or mind) behind the universe ... — Sam26
Confession is good for the soul, they say; don't you feel better now, Sam? :smirk:Ifour[my] goal is to win an argument at all costs because we don’t like aparticular[valid, scary] conclusion, thenwe are[I'm] not doing good philosophy ... especially ifour[the] goal is truth.
What’s the ‘free miracle’? — Wayfarer
Where i put that, I just mean to indicate that we don't know (which ironically, is Carroll's view, elsewhere) and 'miracle' is a placeholder for whatever the answer is...could think here of the breathe-in-breathe-out view of the big bang, but we don't know whether or not that's the case. It would solve the 'miracle' is my point. Anything that answers the question is the 'miracle' until it's found. — AmadeusD
I don’t believe I did that, nor did I wish to imply it. — Wayfarer
Currently the hypothesis, "Our consciousness does not survive death," has been confirmed in applicable tests. You'll need to show me actual tests that passed peer review, and can be repeated that show our consciousness exists beyond death. To my mind, there are none, but I am open to read if you cite one.
— Philosophim
Where the obvious difficulty is that of obtaining an objective validation of a subjective state of being and which only occurs in extreme conditions. — Wayfarer
Myself, I don't really see how the claim that there can be a state beyond physical death is ever going to be scientifically validated, although I believe there are research programs underway to do that. — Wayfarer
It's easy to dismiss Stevenson as a crank or charlatan but he did amass a considerable amount of data which I happen to think is a more empirically reliable source of data than NDE testimonies. — Wayfarer
I also laid out a sketch of an alternative metaphysic, within which the idea of continuity from life-to-life might be considered plausible, to which you didn't respond. — Wayfarer
But I think the soul could be better conceived in terms of a field that acts as an organising principle - analogous to the physical and magnetic fields that were discovered during the 19th century, that were found to be fundamental in the behaviour of particles. — Wayfarer
As the morphic field is capable of storing and transmitting remembered information, then 'the soul' could be conceived in such terms. The morphic field does, at the very least, provide an explanatory metaphor for such persistence. — Wayfarer
Then he identified from journals, birth-and-death records, and witness accounts, the deceased person the child supposedly remembered, and attempted to validate the facts from those sources that matched the child’s memory. — Wayfarer
Carroll goes on in his essay to say that 'Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions (about the persistence of consciousness)'. However, that springs from his starting assumption that 'the soul' must be something physical, which, again, arises from the presumption that everything is physical, or reducible to physics. — Wayfarer
Wayfarer, I keep telling you I'm a lot more open to your ideas then you'll allow in your own head. Give people a chance, especially if they're willing to engage with you. — Philosophim
From my point we can replace the word physics with, "Measureable". And as I noted earlier, logically, if there is some other type of substance that interacts with the human body, it must be detectable in some way. It would be part of reality, and measurable. — Philosophim
I have often thought the memories and their preservation could be captured somehow. Generally though memory is stored as a medium, and it needs a translator to process it into an experience. — Philosophim
That’s all well and good if your criteria of reincarnation is as slack as a good impression of that person or just imitation. Personhood has a more strict definition of what a person is as it covers what that person has experienced in life their memories made, habits personality traits and just general character. The issue boils down to personal identity and what it means to be you. — kindred
why should it be assumed that the question of reincarnation has a definite and absolute answer that transcends our conventions? — sime
As I mentioned to Philosophim, the point about the children with past-life recall is that there is at least the possibility of validating their statements against documentary and witness accounts, something which is obviously not possible with near-death experiences, as they are first-person by definition. — Wayfarer
In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground.
Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground.
The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin.
Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way. — Source
God is at least as complex as a human being, so therefore the same argument would apply to a God. — Philosophim
God is necessary because he is simple and not because he exists in all metaphysically possible worlds. And while one may say that the simple God is or exists, God is not an existent among existents or a being among beings, but Being (esse) itself in its prime instance and in this respect is different from every other being (ens). — SEP
You may not be familiar with the research. It wasn’t based on 'past-life regression'. The cases Stevenson sought out were those where children claimed to be someone other than who they were known to be e.g. would start saying 'your not my family' or 'this is not my home, I live in (some other place)' etc. Then the researchers would look for evidence of that claimed previous identity, trying to identify death notices, locations, and other details to corroborate the infant's story. — Wayfarer
For example, lets assume that the account you mention is accurate and defies mundane natural explanations. Then unless one has defined personhood in terms of personal memories, one cannot conclude that the child is a reincarnation of the previous person he is said to remember. In which case all that one concludes is that the child presently has abnormal access to novel information of historical significance. — sime
↪Philosophim ↪Sam26 Also contra "intelligent design" (i.e. creationism), consider the dysteleological argument:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design
In sum: both the universe in general and organic life in particular appear defective, or suboptimal, just as it's most reasonable to expect it be according evident and explicablee, nonintelligent processes of (e.g.) nucleogenesis and biological evolution (especially given that 99.99% of baryonic matter – the observable universe that has been expanding for at least 13.8 billion years from a planck radius of random (i.e. non-causal, ergo not "created / designed") fluctuations – is vacuum radiation inimical to organic/human life (in a universe evidently "fine-tuned" for lifelessness). — 180 Proof
But is He? Richard Dawkins also says that, but it founders on the rock of divine simplicity. — Wayfarer
According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God is simple, not complex, and not composed of parts.
God is necessary because he is simple and not because he exists in all metaphysically possible worlds. And while one may say that the simple God is or exists, God is not an existent among existents or a being among beings, but Being (esse) itself in its prime instance and in this respect is different from every other being (ens). — Wayfarer
I looked at your thread on 'first cause', but I don't think you're at all familiar with the classical description of 'first cause'. A forum thread is not the place to try and fill that void, and anyway, I lack the expertise to do it. — Wayfarer
If you're going on the fact of an intelligent designer, we need a base line of what 'intelligent' means. Can a dog create anything more complex then a hole? No. A beaver can create dams. Monkeys can create primitive tools. So if we're going to state that there is an intelligent designer, at minimum, it would need to be at the level of a human. If it did not have intelligence, then it would be a mechanical process, but then it wouldn't really be a designer anymore either. — Philosophim
None of which has any bearing on what ‘divine intelligence’ means. I’m not sticking up for the idea, but at least it should be framed in the terms of classical theism. — Wayfarer
You may think that the doctrine of divine simplicity is ‘nonsense’ but it is the orthodox view of the nature of God. So rather than dispute intelligent design on spurious philosophical grounds you’d be better off saying you just don’t believe in it. — Wayfarer
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