Well to me the point is that if you have nothing better to go on, it is surely better to ask the mediums or OOB experiencers what they feel they are doing. I mean surely looking at an Akashic record would feel different from communicating with a consciousness that was a direct continuation of the consciousness that was a deceased person.
David
Everything we experience in the ordinary waking conscious state is interpreted. What our normal perceptual apparatus, similar in all of us, perceives, is a world of what we interpret as tables, chairs and stars. This is the root of materialism; we can't help but perceive the world in a certain way, hence the world must literally be that way.
And yet, the double slit and related experiments present to us in the normal waking state something that defies that interpretation. Evidently, the world
isn't composed of tiny billiard balls that bang into one another and cause everything we perceive, either directly through the senses or indirectly through instruments we construct.
However, when it comes to more liminal phenomena such as certain paranormal ones, which often aren't experienced in the normal waking state, many a non-materialist tends to revert to an unrecognised form of materialism. The seeming deceased personality we see or hear or otherwise sense must be interpreted literally as we perceive it. There can be no valid different way of interpreting it.
Think about it: what you're saying is that the "Akashic record" (I only use the term because it's widely known -- a better term might be the "information repository" as I put it, accessible in certain states of mind), couldn't be experienced except as something akin to a book.
However, if we can
only experience it in a particular state of mind
as if it's a deceased person or a disembodied external/internal voice, that's no proof that an Akashic record doesn't exist. I see that as a reversion, in the liminal realm, to the same kind of interpretative logic that pertains in the normal waking state.
So is there a parallel to the double-slit experiment for the liminal realm? Something that might cause one to question the literal interpretation of certain paranormal phenomena? Maybe. In NDEs for example, different people perceive different entities, experience different kinds of event, etc. but, broadly speaking, there are commonalities in the NDE structure which may be interpreted by experiencers in the light of personal/culturally-induced conditioning. Incidentally, that doesn't exclude the possibility that some perceptions can later be verified, because in the NDE state, people may have access at different times to both the liminal and everyday world (as the latter is perceived in ordinary waking consciousness).
If people perceive Jesus as a deeply loving person emitting glorious light, then that must surely show that Jesus
is a deeply loving person emitting glorious light. If some perceived person like one's deceased uncle, who was close to one in life and greatly loved and admired, appears to one and acts as a guide, then it must surely show that one's deceased uncle is literally one's deceased uncle acting as a guide.
I doubt that. Just as I doubt that a materialistic interpretation of the world in the ordinary waking state is literally true. That doesn't mean that in our ordinary waking state, we don't actually perceive what we perceive. We definitely perceive tables, chairs and stars, although whether or not they are literally tables, chairs and stars is a different question entirely, asked by Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup to name but two.
Likewise, in the NDE state of mind, whilst I do not doubt that many NDE reports are genuinely
perceived as described, I doubt that they are literal recensions of what actually happened.
Something happened and is being honestly reported, to be sure, but interpreted in the only way it can be reported, which draws heavily on ordinary language and personal/cultural conditioning -- which offers, I maintain, a framework for interpretation in all circumstances, liminal or otherwise.