Alex Tsakiris and Tom Jump Debate Near Death Experience Sceicne |408|

In my view, reincarnation doesn’t happen. You get one physical life and an eternal afterlife. I’ve heard stories about people that supposedly remember things from previous lives. This could possibly be a psychic phenomenon, where mental impressions from the past can somehow affix to a living mind, Then again, I don’t know if past life memories have ever been concretely verified.
There has been significant research into this phenomenon, looking for cases where a child both claimed to remember a past life, and could recall details from that life.

https://www.near-death.com/reincarnation/research/ian-stevenson.html

David
 
I have to confess I did not listen to the show. In fact I thought it was entirely text based and was a bit puzzled by references to listening to it. As it turned out, for some reason the show didn't appear in my podcast feed until today - and I deleted it without listening to it - with no pang of conscience.
I too left the show, but I would have listened if someone had reported anything interesting!

David
 
I don't really know what Tjump's precise stance is. He seems to be a materialist and an atheist, but then he seems to be indicating he can be convinced otherwise and accepts a certain amount of evidence for NDEs, etc.

His fallback position seems to be science-of-the-gaps admixed with a promissory note. There's something we don't know, and the gap will most probably be filled by science, practised more or less as it is now. Anyone who can prove him wrong on that, he'll change his mind and stop looking for materialistic explanations. Well, of course, no one can prove him wrong with regard to something that hasn't yet been discovered. Can I prove that at some future time some method of detecting presently undetectable signals in the dying brain won't go some way towards explaining NDEs? No.

There's always a chance that such signals will be detected. Why, it's probably part of the million things we don't know but that must (of course) be explicable under the current paradigms of science, or ones very similar to them. No matter that we didn't find the answer in the signals materialists hoped and believed we would. Let's let go of that pack animal and go looking for another, for surely it will be found; can't fail to be.

No less strong than faith in an Abrahamic God, is faith in materialism. I know, because I went from the former to the latter, before (eventually) ending up as an idealist with faith in consciousness as the fundamental primitive, and a science based on that idea rather than materialism could be more productive. I admit it's a faith, though it's backed up by quite a lot of evidence plus a little personal experience. I could be wrong, but I find the evidence intellectually satisfying because it explains much that neither Abrahamism nor materialism can (nor a number of other -isms including theism in general, dualism, panpsychism and animism).

That's just a personal opinion, and we all have those -- including TJump. It wouldn't be so bad if there was public space for varied opinion; if the models people have in their minds were recognised and encouraged to compete in the marketplace of ideas. I guess the thing about there being dominant paradigms is precisely their dominance, which tends to stifle other, possibly more fruitful, ways of modelling reality.

Empiricism is purportedly the backbone of science, and yet at present, quite a lot of science is based not on observation but speculation, and pretty wild speculation at that -- one might say woowoo. Modern science with its Big Bang (a universe arising out of nothing one fine day), black holes, neutron stars, inflation theory, etc. indulges in faux mysticism just as religion has always done in the past.

And, as in the past, its loyal devotees unquestioningly parrot the mantras as if they're facts as real as noses on faces. This enables them to bask in the glow of the exalted ones, borrowing from their authority, happily declaring heresy on, and and sneeringly denigrating, anyone who might want to pursue ideas residing outside the box they've defined. Why not? So many of their heroes do the same thing.

It's all totally FUBAR: gnarled and broken. These people have the effrontery to question the empirical evidence provided by rigorous NDE research, and at the same time to glibly accept without question so much of the woowoo that passes for "science" these days. I'm not saying that science is all completely wrong, still less useless. Models based on empirical evidence sometimes prove extraordinarily useful. But that doesn't prove that the models are literally true. Take the Bohr model of the atom: it's bollocks, but not entirely without utility if only as an educational tool.

More than anything, mathematics is responsible for the cachet that many modern scientific theories possess. Most of us aren't terribly good mathematicians, and stand in awe of those who are -- and they are probably aware of this and can't help feeling a bit special. By using pure mathematics in pursuit of beauty rather than truth, mathematical physicists have come up with some pretty exotic models.

They speak without hindrance, nay with active encouragement, about aforesaid black holes, multiple universes, and so on, looking for the merest scintilla of confirmatory "empirical" evidence to support their models, and at the same time reject whole swathes of actual empirical evidence that support uglier but possibly truer models of reality. That's why Electric Universe and cold fusion theories, for example, have garnered so much opprobrium: have had their leading exponents be marginalised or excommunicated.

I suppose the rot set in with Darwinism, the idea that a combination of RM+NS could account for macroevolution. Initially, the theory looked fairly plausible, but that was a time when cells were seen as mere blobs of protoplasm, and the fossil record could -- you never know -- have come to show many infinitesmal shades of variation between one type of body form and the next.

Today, the cell is shown to be of gargantuan complexity, and virtually all the modern extant phyla appear to have arisen in a comparatively short period during the Cambrian explosion. At the molecular level, there's no naturalistic explanation of how the DNA code came about, because it isn't dependent on pure chemistry, and the odds against random mutation being able to produce one (let alone thousands) of working proteins are enormous. As to abiogenesis (the origin of life), it's no less of a problem. There's increasing rebellion against Darwinism even among members of the non-ID camp, the so-called Third Way people.

We need much more space for rebelliousness like this in science. IMO, it needs to be much more vibrant and open to new ideas than it is now; it's presently full of sheep enclosed in barbed-wire paddocks to prevent wolves from entering, and sheep from straying. Arguably, fewer and fewer big discoveries are being made -- hardly surprising when the establishment sees to it that all the funding goes to those inside the paddocks, and woe betide any lamb that might leap the fence.

The really interesting figures, those I see as true scientists with open minds, have to tread carefully lest they suffer the fate of Hannes Alfven, Pons and Fleischmann, Peter Duesberg, Rupert Sheldrake, Jacques Benveniste and a host of other thinkers. The problem is, they are vilified, marginalised and ignored (and their work even actively lied about) by the high priests of modern science religion. Their models don't fit in, threaten the reigning paradigm, so they must be denigrated at all costs, otherwise many in the mainstream will lose their cushy jobs inventing absurd new theories or infinitesimally adjusting existing ones.

Like I said, I don't know where precisely on the materialist spectrum Tjump lies, so how much of the above applies to him I can't say; in any case, this isn't really a diatribe against him personally, but against the present attitude of modern science. It's not just that it rejects the primacy of consciousness, psi and other things it considers "woowoo", but it also gangs up against any idea that threatens the status quo.

Latitude is only allowed in acceptable directions, and in those almost anything goes, however offensive to commonsense. You want to talk about matter that can't be detected? About quasars that are purportedly enormously energetic and unimaginably far away despite the fact they appear to be connected to much closer galaxies? About all red shift as being down to the Doppler effect when it could actually be related to the age of galaxies? About basing your whole cosmogony on such ideas?

Fine. Wonderful. Here's a billion dollars, go build yourself a Hadron collider or launch a new space mission where you can continue to be surprised that empirical results don't support your theories. Waste as much money as you like, deprive resources from as many promising new lines of research as possible. We want to keep you as happy as pigs in dung, carrying on as always and getting yourselves more and more tied in knots tinkering endlessly with existing models.
 
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I found this interview very aggravating and I'm not sure arguing with skeptics actually does any good for either party. (And i used to be one. I used to fight with college bible thumpers and thought I was matter's gift to intellectual rational thought. It took 7 hits of LSD and a telepathic experience to smack me into reality. Let them learn the hard way, why should we suffer?)...

Thanks for a terrific and highly entertaining post, Kindagamey!
 
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How so? To talk about consciousness is to talk about all animals with consciousness, not just humans. Anything with a consciousness has a soul. If consciousness is created by God, then this would be true for all animals with the neurological capacity for consciousness. I believe that God created this, and any other universe in existence. I also believe that this universe was created for life to be possible. However, to believe that God personally creates every consciousness in every brain seems far-fetched. Wouldn’t God want the brain to work on its own? To me, the meaning of life is to come into existence and to choose our path. The meaning of intelligent life is to choose between good and evil. Life is the beginning, and it precedes spiritual existence.
I think most people accept that animals have consciousness. Remarkably there is also evidence suggesting that single cells have some sort of consciousness.

http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/g-buehler/FRAME.HTM

I am not a Christian, nor do I think there is something intrinsically different about human beings as opposed to other animals.

Some Christian biologists are trying to prove that evolution by natural selection will not work. I think this is another strand to watch:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/behes-argument-in-darwin-devolved.4317/
My thinking on the soul is unorthodox. I believe that the brain does produce and sustain consciousness. The soul is the non-physical or inner consciousness. In other words, the soul is a product of the brain. I don’t believe that God installs souls into brains in utero. I also believe that, once a consciousness begins, it never ends. Consciousness is partially in non-physical reality during life, and completely in non-physical reality after death.

The physical precedes the spiritual.
My feeling is that once someone abandons the totally orthodox scientific position regarding consciousness - as you seem to have done - it is probably best not to adopt a new kind of rigid belief, but to remain open minded. Once you begin to even talk about non-physical reality, the number of possibilities opens up immensely. For example, a number of people report that in their NDE's they found themselves in a timeless realm - think what that might imply if true!

David
 
Good job, mostly, but I was disappointed that the discussion went down the "possible" vs. "likely" rabbit hole at the end. You did better than I would have in the same position. I think the crux of this whole debate was missed, and I will raise it here. I apologize if someone has already addressed this, I honestly don't have time to read all the comments in a timely fashion before making this post. I did read a lot of them, and didn't see this point.

What is the difference between "science" and "magic?" (Or "science" and "supernatural?") What justification does TJump have for labeling one option "natural" and the other "supernatural", (thereby implying it's "nu-natural")? Doesn't that labeling show explicit bias for one explanation, even though he said, up front, that he didn't care which turned out to be true? Since you two didn't define your terms, you often talked past each other. The term "natural" was never defined in the context either. The real issue here is the the belief that "science" is good, "magic" is bad, that we must defend "good science" from "bad superstition" by any means necessary, and I get to define what is "magic" and what is "science" based on nothing more than my own opinion (and my friends, who agree with me!).

The line between science and magic moves all the time, and now consciousness and the psi are crossing that line, while the religious fundamentalists and ridged materialists are scrambling hard to push them back. (I wonder if any of the materialists have realized the irony that defending their position now requires that they deny hard science?) They conflate materialism with science, and any challenge to materialism to an "attack on science." The sad fallout of this is people like TJump using scientifically questionable methods to defend their positions, thereby legitimizing these methods for the flat earthers, antiVaxxers, and anyone else with a belief to promote.

I suspect that if we drilled down deep enough, we would find this conflation: mind<>brain = God (or gods) exist, and that is what TJump is afraid of. Despite his assertion that he doesn't care what explanation turns out to be true, he clearly has a dog in this fight.

I get your point regarding natural versus supernatural, but I like to look at it from a scientific perspective. one of the great things that these nde researchers have done for us is publish in peer-reviewed journals according to present scientific standards. t's nice to have a well-defined set of criteria for playing this game... in this case that means that one can falsify the mind=brain hypothesis if one shows that consciousness exist a time when the brain state is severely compromised to the point that we wouldn't expect it to be able to produce any organized memories or conscious experience. I realize this is a very narrowly defined definition that's the game we're playing here. in this particular debate TJump tried to jump past known science and speculate about all sorts of other stuff that may be occurring that would contradict 70 years of well-documented neuroscience. now I'm not a huge fan of all that neuroscience has produced but I don't think we can just step over all its findings on a whim because we don't like the implications.
 
I cannot find the post, but many years ago Alex seemed to claim oxygen doesn't affect memory recall of NDE's. And my memory is vague, but didn't Sam Parnia work on that very issue?
I don't recall saying that. you're right, this was the first think Peter Fenwick and Sam Parnia looked at. again, it's just skeptical silliness... of course these guys looked at all of that stuff and the research never would have made it into a peer-reviewed journal if they hadn't.

It does matter. Maybe Alex's point was that NDE's occur WITH or WITHOUT normal brain activity -- and they do.

agreed
 
Thanks for a terrific and highly entertaining post, Kindagamey!.

Ooh thanks, I wasn't entirely sober so I was a bit more vigorous than usual. :D

Apologies for using links I've used here before, but some of them (like the free will article and the placebo vid) are like milestones for me in understanding. You never know what might activate someone else so I tend to throw a buffet and see what sticks.

I failed to mention it, but I even believe that evolution is a function of will / intent being encoded over time. We know now that DNA even changes over a person's lifetime via methylation / epigenetics. (e.g. a culture that values big booties will start to see bigger and bigger booties as time goes on. i'm not sure anyone has done this study tho.)

Also I hope you guys clicked on that UFO google drive link... that's an archive of a few snapshots of charts in the Beyond UFOs book that I'm reading now. We truly are entering a new phase of human development, if we survive. Did these influences from outside of 3D basically create the new age movement? Will we eventually escape linear time?

Not to mention that cannabis and soon psychedelics will be legalized for use in therapy and personal growth. Meditation and weed both can convert a 50-year-old's neuroplasticity to that of a 25-year-old's. I believe that these pseudo-skeptics really need more neuroplasticity to get outside of the mental trap they've created for themselves. Their belief systems are calcified.

Imagination is absolutely the tool by which we navigate this soup - ask an OBE'er/NDE'er/lucid dreamer how they travel to where they want to go. They just think themselves there. The pseudo-skeptics have stunted their own growth by cutting off such a valuable organ as awareness and intuition just by thinking it impossible. If you need to tell yourself that it can be explained by transmissions via the heliosphere's plasma or whatever you want, be my guest!

I hear that "Think and Grow Rich" is one of the most important books you could ever read. Here's a free PDF workbook about it. It is ALL about translating imagination into reality. Once you start to see the theme of consciousness being the precursor to matter you won't be able to stop seeing it - everywhere.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1avAk7e822-K-PSIh_vLNcSG40NlnNigc
Capture.JPG
 
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TJump,
Why are you bringing up research on coma patients?

Everyone agrees that coma patients are not dead.

btw - IMO, Eber Alexander's coma experience should not be counted as an NDE. Weak.
I look at this differently... NDEs seem to be occurring in all sorts of different brains :) this is further evidence for there reality and significance.
 
Is that because the blood was still flowing in his brain, or because the NDE itself was extremely unusual?

David

David,
Yes. Because his brain was compromised, but still "alive" - and because his experience was atypical of an NDE; lots of dream like features.

That doesn't mean it wasn't paranormal. In fact, in some aspects it were (e.g. learning about a sister he never knew had existed). It just isn't an NDE per se in my opinion.
 
I look at this differently... NDEs seem to be occurring in all sorts of different brains :) this is further evidence for there reality and significance.

Yes. Once again I agree with you.

However, If someone falls off a mountain or is in a car crash and has an NDE, but never actually died from a clinical perspective, then a TJump could say that the brain was hallucinating under stress. I don't see it that way, but it is something counter that could hold some power if a materialist was trying to convince a naïve person.

When the heart and brain are flatlined, Then TJump must expose his magical thinking/faith based ideology that a flatlined brain still has enough cellular activity going on to create a highly organized, "realer than real" experience with - upon occasion - veridical content that could not have been obtained by normal means - or even by any means that TJump theorizes.

He must say that flatline brain is still perceiving what is happening in the ICU and making a coherent reality out of it.

Furthermore, that all of the organized experienced can be remembered post resuscitation - and make long lasting spiritual changes in the person.

Another point from me - What TJump is hypothesizing would necessarily be very similar to sleep paralysis; remnant cellular activity in the brain of a dead body formulating the NDE, integrating perceptions of activities in the hospital room into accurate dioramas representing what actually happened in the room at the time. But we have many people who have experienced sleep paralysis (myself included) and it is nothing like an NDE. Basically, you are aware and unable to move, see, talk or act. It can be very frightening. Sometimes that state does include some hypnogogic imagery; which is also often frightening and weird and nothing like an NDE.

Alex - since you have contact history w/ Parnia, Von Lommel, Long, etc, what do you think abut contacting them and asking them about TJump's ATP theory and then bringing back their response? Or have them directly address TJump?
 
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Alex, I am by no means a prude and love to swear, but I believe it detracts from professional venues like Skeptiko. In this interview and the one with Forte, you swear a great deal, so that I hesitate to forward these two to relevant forums whose admins and members never swear. Is it my imagination or are you swearing much more often in recent shows? I have been listening for years, and forwarding / sharing frequently, and this does seem to be a recent trend.
 
I found this interview very aggravating and I'm not sure arguing with skeptics actually does any good for either party. (And i used to be one. I used to fight with college bible thumpers and thought I was matter's gift to intellectual rational thought. It took 7 hits of LSD and a telepathic experience to smack me into reality. Let them learn the hard way, why should we suffer?)

I was thinking about how pseudo-skepticism/materialism is actually detrimental to your level of awareness (self-awareness specifically.) It is a methodology whereby you are unable to deal with uncertainty and you feel the need to keep cropping the full picture of life as if the extraneous/non-logical/non-causal data will tarnish the brain like a disease. It turns out if you're smart enough you can throw as much sh** as you want into your worldview-mobile and start to make out patterns; it doesn't hurt at all. So really skeptics are truly doing themselves a disservice. Also, it's just not as fun. Remember awe? Remember magic? You're killing it. And don't you dare try to neil degrasse your way out of this one. Sonnets of awe about meaninglessness, no matter how well stated, are meaningless.

Does meaninglessness even exist? If a painter working on my house is having a shitty day because he's having troubles in his marriage and leaves one sad wayward paintbrush stroke where his disheartened mind couldn't bring up the effort to blend it in - that meaning is now permanently embedded in my house's paint job. And it's absolutely and completely real and causal. There is no "physical world" as opposed to a "thought world" they are one and the same. Do you think all the repeating archetypes in our fictions throughout history are not real? Contrary to the skeptics, the world is absolutely STUFFED with meaning. You can't escape it.

Metaphors we live by
http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html

If you believe you are a robot in a meaningless universe, guess what, you are!! and your body/mind reacts accordingly:
https://bigthink.com/artful-choice/do-you-believe-in-free-will-maybe-you-should-even-if-you-dont

"Do You Believe In Free Will? Maybe You Should, Even If You Don't"
"What the scientists then discovered is that the brains of those participants with a dampened belief in free will actually showed a reduction in RP amplitude: not just their minds, but their brains appeared to have taken the reading to heart. They reported the intention to act at the same time as the control group, but their brains were not preparing as well—or as eagerly—as those of their counterparts.

What we believe, it seems, affects us much more fundamentally than previously thought. At least when it comes to free will, disbelief can affect neural processes at a stage before we are even aware that they are taking place."

Then there are the studies where we show people flashing images and their galvanic skin response changes slightly BEFORE they actually physically see an image with a sexual or violent nature. Now how the hell can that be possible? Retrocausality? It used to confound me too. If you stop spitting out these seeds as impossible and actually chew on them, you just might learn something.

Imagination is the way that we do anything... when you hit a baseball you are not making a trajectory calculation, you are imagining a future potential and trying to bring it into your reality. We discovered when we tried to get robots to catch things that the trajectory methodology was actually very difficult. If you want to record brainwaves to move your new replacement robotic limb, how do you do that? You imagine that limb moving. That's it. It's that simple. We record it and then associate the imagination with the actual movements of the limb. What if we add a ridiculous limb in the middle of your chest? How do you record the brainwaves of moving that limb? You just imagine it. They record it. When you do it again the computer sees the pattern and the limb moves.

You ever hit that perfect pool shot and knew it would go in? Did you calculate it or did you just feel it? Ever heard the expression 'in the zone'? What is the zone? It's where you aren't thinking, where the limitation engine that is your brain is no longer getting in the way. And it turns out that's exactly where superior athletes go. We know that athletes that pretend/imagine a scenario where they accomplish something in meditation do better than those who don't. We know that the physical body does not know the difference between a person actually doing something and that thing happening in a dream, the brain interprets it in the the same way.

The Strange Power of the Placebo Effect

^ How can the placebo effect be SO strong? We think something and it happens? Why do a group of Christians praying for someone to heal faster actually makes them heal faster? Why does a group of Buddhists praying in a city center actually reduce crime statistically? (Look those up yourselves.) How on Earth could that be possible? Seems crazy, right? Only because your worldview is inside out and you are strenuously holding it in that position.

LSD actually mimics serotonin production which means your brain stops producing it because it thinks everything is fine. Serotonin is a limiter / governor / faucet. So people doing LSD are actually experiencing MORE of reality, not a "hallucination". And yet brain activity goes down? How can that be?
https://www.scienceandtechnologyres...-peek-inside-the-brain-during-hallucinations/

Funny that people that experience NDEs and OBEs also say that their experiences are "more real than real" when the brain has less activity (in NDE's case, NO activity,) now how can that be? This is getting weird, huh? It doesn't make sense in a material universe? And it won't until you break that restrictive mold.

Why Physicalism is Wrong
https://philosophynow.org/issues/126/Why_Physicalism_is_Wrong

I mean, you could get your ass handed to you by Bernardo Kastrup's articles in Scientific American, but I don't want you to get too scared all at once:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/bernardo-kastrup/

I mean hell, even Shermer gets smacked by the fringes of reality every once and a while:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/

Then there's this podcast I listen to called Skeptiko, it's super informative even though the host is a bit of an ass (i'm kidding, he's absolutely a lovely man)...
https://skeptiko.com/94-jeffrey-long-near-death-experience-research/

“I looked at over 280 near-death experiences that had out-of-body observations of Earthly ongoing events… If near-death experiences were just fragments of memory, unrealistic remembrances of a time approaching unconsciousness or returning from unconsciousness, there is no chance that the observations would have a high percent of completely accurate observations. They’d be dream-like or hallucinations. But 98% of them were entirely realistic… In fact, these observations of Earthly ongoing events often include observations of things that would be impossible for them to be aware of with any sensory function from their physical body. For example, they can see the tops of buildings. They can see far away. In my study over 60 of these near-death experiencers later went back and independently attempted to verify what they saw in the out-of-body state. Every single one of these over 60 near-death experiencers that reported checking or verifying their own observations found that they were absolutely correct in every detail.”, Dr. Long said.

// People floating over their bodies and watching their surgeries and being able to report everything that happened to them accurately as opposed to a control group who died and returned, but had no memory of NDE so made up their stories. What kind of floating magical neurons do you propose to explain this?

Then there's quantum mechanics supposedly reacting to an observer. There's the fact that we cannot actually access an objective reality - EVER. EVERYTHING is interpreted subjectively, including the "science" you worship at the feet of. Then there's telepathy, precognition, the fact that meditators and psychonauts and NDE'rs and OBE'rs and even alien abductees are suddenly struck with the feeling that "everything is ONE."

IANDS - Newest NDE accounts - pick one at random, i dare ya...
https://iands.org/research/nde-research/nde-archives31/newest-accounts.html

What could this be about?

Oh, you don't believe in UFOs? Well that's amazing because the Navy just admitted that they are real and they have buzzed our most sensitive sites. You didn't see that article in politico? Also, we are being provoked into a higher state of awareness by something from outside of our consciousness... we are being evolved:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1avAk7e822-K-PSIh_vLNcSG40NlnNigc

^ Here's a thorough study of N=1000+ people who have experienced contact with some kind of extraplanetary(?) inhuman(?) future_us(?) intelligence. Enjoy that. If your noodle isn't cooking you're doing it wrong.

TJump repeated over and over that we barely know a fraction of anything and damn sure he's right about that one. But that says to me you need to open up your aperture and let some sunshine in because you've been filtering for way too long, son. You ain't got an inkling what's going on here. And there's a LOT to catch up on so you best chop chop.

Let's do some mushrooms together and see how confident you are in the face of a bigger reality than you can imagine. The gods hate posturing and anything less than authenticity will be crushed by the might/light of the awareness. Let's go.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

Well done KindaGamey, look up the hidden observer effect in hypnosis (Hilgard) to add to your quiver, especially in its implications during surgery
and the nocebo/placebo result thereof.
Blaise
 
Alex, I am by no means a prude and love to swear, but I believe it detracts from professional venues like Skeptiko. In this interview and the one with Forte, you swear a great deal, so that I hesitate to forward these two to relevant forums whose admins and members never swear. Is it my imagination or are you swearing much more often in recent shows? I have been listening for years, and forwarding / sharing frequently, and this does seem to be a recent trend.

Wind Crossing, Im not sure its healthy to ask Alex to watch his tongue in case he offends as this might result in less spontaneity.
Swear words are just words in the end, if they offend they offend from a result of our own bias.
 
Wind Crossing, Im not sure its healthy to ask Alex to watch his tongue in case he offends as this might result in less spontaneity.
Swear words are just words in the end, if they offend they offend from a result of our own bias.
Nevertheless, it is valid to point out that it limits the available audience, in effect Alex is fencing himself in.
 
Alex, I am by no means a prude and love to swear, but I believe it detracts from professional venues like Skeptiko. In this interview and the one with Forte, you swear a great deal, so that I hesitate to forward these two to relevant forums whose admins and members never swear. Is it my imagination or are you swearing much more often in recent shows? I have been listening for years, and forwarding / sharing frequently, and this does seem to be a recent trend.
I agree, and if people here start to swear at each other I tolerate a bit of it and then intervene - not that that happens often - but I can't be quite so forceful with the owner of Skeptiko!

I didn't actually watch this show, because I didn't expect to discover anything of interest from it - indeed I think at one point Alex himself said he had hoped for more from that interview.

For me, I think my primary objection, is that people come to these podcasts from very different positions. For example, if I were to say "F*****G science", I know what I would be referring to - the tendency for science to use its authority way outside its domain, and to twist facts mercilessly to assert various things (not always just in support of materialism). OK - so to me, that remark might make sense, but to someone else it could sound like a summary dismissal of our main source of knowledge about the world.

My secondary concern is that it does put people off - maybe very thoughtful people who we should attract.

David
 
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