Matthew Alper, Have Skeptics Lost Their Edge? |448|

So Alex, I am thinking after listening to Matthew that the question is not whether it is worth having conversations with skeptics of the materialist reductionist variety, but rather is it worth having conversations with people who like to have the feeling that they already know the answers more than the feeling that they may have more to learn. A major indicator of conversation worthiness is also how much weight another person places on the number of authorities and institutions that currently maintain the status quo set of ideas and attitudes. Matthew was remarkably transparent in his obsequiousness.
 
Matthew Alper said,
"So that was what I wanted to get to the bottom of, because basically, you know, the question was, I’m either one of two things. I’m either a physical being, which means ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or I’m a spiritual being, which means that even though my body will die, there’s a chance that some aspect of my self, my conscious experience will live on, in which case I’m immortal, so I don’t have to be as nervous about it."

Some of us have had the good fortune, possibly providential good fortune to have had personal experiences which leave no doubt in us about the perpetuity beyond the present, though flesh and bloodless they may be, of our lives into the future. God's awareness or consciousness is eternal. As children of God our consciousness is too. All memory of our past lives and also, "all knowledge" is returned to us at our mortal life's end on this Earth as we regain our place within God. Many Near Death Experiencers will vouch for this. I lament those who are unable, when their time has come, to break completely free of their attachments to this hard world and to instead enjoy their due bliss on the other side.
 
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Matthew Alper said,
"So that was what I wanted to get to the bottom of, because basically, you know, the question was, I’m either one of two things. I’m either a physical being, which means ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or I’m a spiritual being, which means that even though my body will die, there’s a chance that some aspect of my self, my conscious experience will live on, in which case I’m immortal, so I don’t have to be as nervous about it."

Some of us have had the good fortune, possibly providential good fortune to have had personal experiences which leave no doubt in us about the perpetuity beyond the present, though flesh and bloodless they may be, of our lives into the future. God's awareness or consciousness is eternal. As children of God our consciousness is too. All memory of our past lives and also, "all knowledge" is returned to us at our mortal life's end on this Earth as we regain our place within God. Many Near Death Experiencers will vouch for this. I lament those who are unable, when their time has come, to break completely free of their attachments to this hard world and to instead enjoy their due bliss on the other side.
I lament those who think it necessary to wait for some future time or event such as our mortal life's end, to regain our place within God. In my view we can do that now, no waiting needed.
 
Matthew Alper said,
"So that was what I wanted to get to the bottom of, because basically, you know, the question was, I’m either one of two things. I’m either a physical being, which means ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or I’m a spiritual being, which means that even though my body will die, there’s a chance that some aspect of my self, my conscious experience will live on, in which case I’m immortal, so I don’t have to be as nervous about it."

Some of us have had the good fortune, possibly providential good fortune to have had personal experiences which leave no doubt in us about the perpetuity beyond the present, though flesh and bloodless they may be, of our lives into the future. God's awareness or consciousness is eternal. As children of God our consciousness is too. All memory of our past lives and also, "all knowledge" is returned to us at our mortal life's end on this Earth as we regain our place within God. Many Near Death Experiencers will vouch for this. I lament those who are unable, when their time has come, to break completely free of their attachments to this hard world and to instead enjoy their due bliss on the other side.
 

Yes, no argument ever defeats direct experience.

How are you defining "God"? That word has many connotations.

Materialists born into cultures replete with anthropomorphized Gods, reject experiential accounts of God because they bring to mind something like this. youtu-be/OSIrQBGfUtw
 
My first thought on this podcast, which came to mind at the 26:41 mark, is that human memory is more like telepathy than it is like computer memory, While physical damage to the brain may impair our ability to access, process, translate, or communicate information related to prior-derived knowledge, it is not because the information itself is destroyed, but the interface between mind and body.
 
Second thought, stemming from remarks at 27:52 that "we are a thousand different people in our lives" is that Alper is mistaking the physical for the spiritual. That is, it is only because he denies that there is an objectively real side to our existence that he can only see the superficial aspects of our personality. This is what makes it possible to look at youth and old age, or health and disability, as representative of different immutable states, only one of which can be active at any given time, including in a hypothetical afterlife. If he understood the spiritual argument better, he would see gradual physical disability as something that cannot possibly affect the eternal soul, much as worn clothing is not an immutable trait of the person wearing them. I'm a bit surprised that someone can write a best-selling book on this subject without realizing that.
 
Laugh out loud moment, at 38:21, "Whatever you're alluding to, I don't believe it's real." Put another way, "I don't know what you're talking about but I don't believe it anyway." It's good thing he was on Art Bell first instead of Skeptiko. His book might have been less successful otherwise.
 
I hate to be making all these comments as separate posts but the subjects are different so I think they warrant separation. At around 39:31, Alper starts using curricula at various universities against psi. His premise is that he can study physics, chemistry, math, and other subjects at any universities. That shows these are accepted, not "fringe" science. He cannot study any form of psi at more than a handful of schools (though he doesn't even acknowledge this much), therefore it is "fringe" and can safely be ignored. Taking his argument a step further, you can, and in many cases must, take a gender studies course at almost every university in America. Without getting into the politics of such courses, there is a clear disagreement between what is taught in Biology courses and Gender Studies. So is it fringe or not? This is a really weak argument from Alper.
 
Alex says that near death experience research is the best place to go to understand consciousness. I think it is an interesting body of research but prefer reincarnation studies by Stevenson and his colleagues.
 
So Alex, I am thinking after listening to Matthew that the question is not whether it is worth having conversations with skeptics of the materialist reductionist variety, but rather is it worth having conversations with people who like to have the feeling that they already know the answers more than the feeling that they may have more to learn. A major indicator of conversation worthiness is also how much weight another person places on the number of authorities and institutions that currently maintain the status quo set of ideas and attitudes. Matthew was remarkably transparent in his obsequiousness.
yeah I think the only reason it's important is because these people still have the stage / microphone. I mean you got to see the endorsements this guy has for his book... it's a who's who of science
https://www.amazon.com/God-Part-Brain-Interpretation-Spirituality/dp/1402214529

so that's the only reason to talk to him
 
My first thought on this podcast, which came to mind at the 26:41 mark, is that human memory is more like telepathy than it is like computer memory, While physical damage to the brain may impair our ability to access, process, translate, or communicate information related to prior-derived knowledge, it is not because the information itself is destroyed, but the interface between mind and body.
nice!
 
Laugh out loud moment, at 38:21, "Whatever you're alluding to, I don't believe it's real." Put another way, "I don't know what you're talking about but I don't believe it anyway." It's good thing he was on Art Bell first instead of Skeptiko. His book might have been less successful otherwise.
I like how rupert sheldrake experienced it: "I wouldn't believe it even if it was true."
 
Alex says that near death experience research is the best place to go to understand consciousness. I think it is an interesting body of research but prefer reincarnation studies by Stevenson and his colleagues.
I get your point. it is cleaner in a lot of ways.
 
Chris Knowles has a new article up (seems to be part 1 of a series) where he talks about the skeptical movement:

https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-demon-haunted-world-after-all-part-1.html
He ties nu atheism to Epstein without any evidence, no citations, just read and believe me. Oh but they also went through hardships at a similar time? Sounds like proof to me.


Epstein's money was the driving force behind New Scientism and its comic-book corollaries like Transhumanism. Along with Bill Gates and other paranoid billionaires, Epstein funded Transhumanist associations and Transhumanist-adjacent research at major universities to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

And Epstein courted and financed many of the leading figures in New Scientism.



He held conferences to court New Scientismists and parties to raise cash for them. This vast network of money and influence fed a constant stream of propaganda to the credulous children who've been manning the science desks at major media outlets since the 2007 financial crisis swept away all the real journalists.



In that light, do notice that the New Scientism and Nu Atheist movements began to flounder when Epstein started getting hammered by lawsuits from his former sex-slaves around 2014-5.



Coincidence?

Sure, if you believe in coincidences.
 
He ties nu atheism to Epstein without any evidence, no citations, just read and believe me. Oh but they also went through hardships at a similar time? Sounds like proof to me.
thanks for the heads up on this... I'm diving in :)
 
Matthew Alper seems to have conflated materialism with physicalism. the first is the philosophy that only material things exist, so when the material body dies there's nothing left (note however, there may still be room for an unknown "stuff", yet to be discovered), whereas physicalism its bastard child, adds energy, space-time & information to the list (this incidentally falsifies materialism but the proponents of physicalism don't like to interpret it that way, rather they tend to see it just as an extension & refinement of the former), leaving the possibility that when the body dies, some form of energy (i.e,deathflash) or space-time (esp hyper-dimensional) or information is preserved. Also his point that "God" is a human construct of the brain, whilst being true is meaningless, because it doesn't negate the possibility of a "God" outside of one's brain as well, & we might ask him "what isn't a construct of the brain?", even the brain is a construct of the brain!
 
That's a very interesting link. Not only does it appear that the degree of observation determines the degree of interference, but also that the degree of observation of the presumably non-conscious "observing" device itself affects that degree of interference, rather than any subsequent human observation of the data. Is there any bottom to this rabbit-hole?

There is in quantum physics an idea called the "von Neumann catastrophe" or the "Case of Wigner's friend", where the wave-function of the measuring apparatus is itself collapsed by observation of a conscious entity, which could be applicable to decoherence, in that the environment doesn't collapse the wave-function, but observation of the environment then causes it to collapse the wave-function, which means decoherence is subjective, not objective, so a wave-function can be in both a collapsed state & a non-collapsed state.
 
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