What pieces of evidence do you find most convincing?

Alana

Member
I know I don’t post often, but here it goes.

What piece of evidence has been the most convincing for you? Have you ever worried you might be wrong?

I feel like I’m trying to make sense of everything and yet it keeps spinning out of my reach. I know anxiety has a part in it, and maybe I’m too deep in analytical thinking, but for some reason no matter how much I read about Psi, mediums and NDEs, I just cannot fully accept that these things are a possibility.

Any answers are appreciated
 
I guess I should’ve expected that lmao
But actually I think you have to experience the problem, our thoughts are just recycling from what we experience, just like you ask a person who has never felt pain to understand what is pain.
 
I know I don’t post often, but here it goes.

What piece of evidence has been the most convincing for you? Have you ever worried you might be wrong?

I feel like I’m trying to make sense of everything and yet it keeps spinning out of my reach. I know anxiety has a part in it, and maybe I’m too deep in analytical thinking, but for some reason no matter how much I read about Psi, mediums and NDEs, I just cannot fully accept that these things are a possibility.

Any answers are appreciated
There is a fine line between evidence that just seems far fetched, and evidence that doesn't seem striking enough.

However, NDE's impress me - even though some of them seem far fetched - because they happen to ordinary people (on the whole), and there is a continuum from very mild NDE's to the experience of Eben Alexander!

I got into a conversation with a couple of friends, and one of them said he thought that when you died that was it. The other guy nodded his head, but I just muttered something about NDE's.This lead to a fascinating discussion - one of them remembered a time when he was a kid and went shopping with his grandma. He said he seemed to faint, and then found himself looking down on him and his grandma. Then she noticed him and panicked - shouting at him, and he was back inside his body! The other one then remembered that he had had something similar in hospital - his may have involved a cardiac arrest, I'm not sure. These things happen.

There is an impressive, but rather turgid book, written by university researchers that gathers together a lot of strange evidence recorded by medical people of various sorts about anomalous consciousness. It is a bit expensive - £20 - but it is a large book. If you plough through it, it will probably change your viewpoint:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00B9ADYGW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

David
 
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I used to be an atheist, not because of any ideological fundamentalism, just because I was educated as a scientist and I was not aware of the evidence for the afterlife.

What change my mind was reading a book about the medium George Anderson. It seemed sincere. Then I read more on the subject of the afterlife and saw how much evidence there is.

All that reading led me to take classes in spirit communication at a Spiritualist church.

But what will convince one person will not necessarily convince another. What a person believes is really a matter for psychology not logical analysis of evidence. Someone who is afraid of flying cannot be convinced it is safe to fly because of information about how rare plane accidents are. In the same way some people will not be convinced of the afterlife by learning about the evidence.

If you are having trouble accepting the evidence for the afterlife it might be useful to look at the question from a psychological point of view. I am not a psychologist so I can't really help with that. But maybe if you tried to understand why you might have a resistance to the idea it would help. Also it can be helpful to notice that people don't use logic to form their beliefs people use logic to defend their beliefs. When you start thinking that way and observing your own thoughts you can begin to see how your own cognitive bias affects your thinking and it can help you see when you are arguing to maintain a point of view instead of being objective about evaluating the evidence.
 
If you are having trouble accepting the evidence for the afterlife it might be useful to look at the question from a psychological point of view. I am not a psychologist so I can't really help with that. But maybe if you tried to understand why you might have a resistance to the idea it would help.
I really don't like that idea - we should look at the evidence, full stop. Once people start arguing psychology, they can argue from both sides, and that just leaves a mess.

David
 
I really don't like that idea - we should look at the evidence, full stop. Once people start arguing psychology, they can argue from both sides, and that just leaves a mess.

David

Belief is a qualia. It is a feeling. You can't produce it through a mechanical process such as symbol manipulation or logic. When people are "convinced" by evidence it is not through logic, it is through psychology, that is why some people are convinced and others are not convinced by the same evidence. Psychology is always involved. When did evidence ever convince a skeptic in the forums here? Evidence is useless against psychological factors. If you ignore psychology and only look at evidence it is like trying to get to the moon by climbing a tree.
 
Belief is a qualia. It is a feeling. You can't produce it through a mechanical process such as symbol manipulation or logic. When people are "convinced" by evidence it is not through logic, it is through psychology, that is why some people are convinced and others are not convinced by the same evidence. Psychology is always involved. When did evidence ever convince a skeptic in the forums here? Evidence is useless against psychological factors. If you ignore psychology and only look at evidence it is like trying to get to the moon by climbing a tree.
I guess Alana's problem is far more about not having seen enough evidence, or talked through what that evidence means.

As I was in the process of exiting Christianity, I remember several conversations in which people suggested that I had lost my belief because of processes that had nothing to do with logic! What you say is true in a sense, but the real thing to get over is the extent to which materialists distort the evidence. Take NDE's:

1) Medics must surely have known about NDE's from way back, but because they didn't make sense from their world view, they ignored the evidence. As I pointed out above, even people who have had something like an NDE, can push the evidence out of their thinking process! Yet it has really been the Internet that has made this phenomenon widely known - medical science had to be pushed to admit even that the phenomenon exists.

2) Perhaps the best way to believe is to listen to a few dogmatically sceptical scientists being interviewed on Skeptiko, for example:

https://skeptiko.com/near-death-experience-skeptic-gm-woerlee/

If such a person is given a soft interview, they can sound amazingly reasonable, but that is because they aren't being pushed by the evidence. Skeptiko interviews are rather more challenging, and you get to hear how these experts deal with facts that challenge their point of view!

3) Sometimes the distortion is really blatant, as in Wiseman's attack on Rupert Sheldrake's experiments on dogs that show evidence of a telepathic bond with their owner that lets them know when their owner is coming home. Only some dogs do this, but that doesn't weaken the evidence from Sheldrake's experiments one jot.

4) More generally, sceptics are very reluctant to join any of the dots. I mean NDE's suggest a continuation of consciousness after death, but so do Death Bed Visions, where a person who has been unable to speak for some time - possibly because of dementia - suddenly become lucid on the point of death and reports phenomena rather similar to NDE's. But there are still more dots to connect, because there are many perfectly well people who report Out of Body Experiences (OBEs)

David
 
4) More generally, sceptics are very reluctant to join any of the dots. I mean NDE's suggest a continuation of consciousness after death, but so do Death Bed Visions, where a person who has been unable to speak for some time - possibly because of dementia - suddenly become lucid on the point of death and reports phenomena rather similar to NDE's.

I think you are merging two separate phenomena. One is Terminal Lucidity. That is something quite distinct and different from Death Bed Visions. In the latter a person (usually of sound mind) might see and perhaps converse with deceased loved ones. In terminal lucidity the person, previously incapacitated typically converses with the living.
 
I think you are merging two separate phenomena. One is Terminal Lucidity. That is something quite distinct and different from Death Bed Visions. In the latter a person (usually of sound mind) might see and perhaps converse with deceased loved ones. In terminal lucidity the person, previously incapacitated typically converses with the living.
Yes thanks, you are right, but both of those phenomena seem to point in the same direction as the evidence from NDE's.

David
 
Heres something I wrote on Facebook. This was a specific response to a challenge by another poster on Facebook, but its relevant here. In addition to the NDE evidence, the fact is that all these other areas have great evidence as well, these other areas being 1) Re-incarnation (the evidence is beyond compelling as numerous University studies show) 2) Dr Julie Beischels double blind study of hundreds of mediums (found accurate. Alex interviewed her actually. 3) The testimony of thousands of period out of body (OBE/Astral) travelers. They report other realms just the same as those who experience NDE's, and they do so in a cohesive and consistent manner 4) The experiences people have had in every area of the world since man began with ghosts. 5) Quantum Physics 6) The research into Psi. Then we have 7) below (All of these lines of evidence are aligned with each other

There have been studies, Penny Sartori's is the one I'm most familiar with, where they asked people who have been resucitated, "after you were dead, describe to us your resucitation." Those claiming to have an NDE described their resucitation generally very well. Those that did not, generally said something like the following, "What do you mean, I was dead." They told them to "try anyways." They did did absolutely terrible. They couldn't explain anything with any accuracy whatsoever. That's the first point I want to raise. The second point I want to make, is directly relative to your first post. Namely, how do we know that NDE's aren't dreams.

How can we know that NDE's are not hallucinations? Several reasons. I want to outline a handful, but there are more than the ones which I will be listing.

1) Shared Death Experiences

These are experienced by people who are completely healthy who just so happen to be near somebody who is dying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BuI-DugnU&t=8s

2) The Blind seeing for the first time during NDE's, and the deaf hearing for the first time. There are several reports and testimonies of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azIh8gsXVRg&t=84s

3) Veridical NDE's

People floating outside their bodies (often to other rooms) to report conversations and events which later check out as accurate. There are a great deal of these on record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gGqpxa32og

4) These events are life altering. People change permanently. They report a non-existence of time. Those are two (there are many more) rather bizarrely common reportedly themes of NDE's. This doesnt fit the notion that they are Hallucinations, which are disorganized and bizarre and rarely make sense, and generally have no typical after effects. In contrast, NDE's are reported as being more real and clear than everyday real life, and that they make every day existence seem like a mere dream. This is nothing like a hallucination or dream.

5) People very frequently encounter dead people during their NDE's. Notice, they're not meeting living people. Strange coincidence if its a dream that all the people they run into just so happen to be dead isn't it? And why are people hallucinating something which is like what we would think the afterlife would be? Why arent people hallucinating their 57 Chevy? Why are there profound and intelligent moral lessons which are learned? Why this undescribable state of love expressed during these experiences? Sounds a lot like what we would expect an afterlife to be based upon the religious writings of the wise man, sages, holy men, and shaman of the past.

6) There are a lot of reports of people given information about the future, which eventually came true


7) Miraculous healings which people were told would occur during their NDE's, and actually occur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPmtfW3BIGs

 
Thanks wormwood, you definitely gave me a lot to look into.

I suppose one of my main problems is that it always feels like I’ve got a tinfoil hat on when I look for this stuff.
 
Thanks wormwood, you definitely gave me a lot to look into.

I suppose one of my main problems is that it always feels like I’ve got a tinfoil hat on when I look for this stuff.
That’s the way that mainstream materialists want us to feel. Don’t worry about it. It’s their loss. Their world view is extremely boring, unimaginative, depressing, and silly.
 
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