I find that quite fascinating - did you remember any of it, and did it change the way you view life on earth?
I've been on Skeptiko for a long time, and Alex did a couple of interviews with Julie Beischel. She is a statistician that set out to test the medium phenomenon by creating a multiply blinded test. Fortunately, she managed to recruit some mediums for this work, because it involved them working in a very strange way. Clients who participated never talked or contacted the medium under test at all! They talked to a researcher who then talked to the medium in a highly stylised way. The medium relayed her information back via the researcher, and the client got a printout of what the medium said.
In fact, each client got two printouts - one that related to their loved one, and one that related to someone else. The client had to select which script related to their loved one!
By repeating this procedure many times Julie Beischel was able to select those mediums that still performed way over chance at this extraordinary task!
Astral travelling I feel less certain about, but again there is some pretty convincing evidence about this.
I also think the evidence from NDEs is solid. I mean there is such a consistent story about viewing the resuscitation process from above. I know the efforts to get patients to spot information that is only visible from on high has not gone very well, but to me, this is an extreme test too far. Imagine you found yourself having an NDE - I don't think you would notice irrelevant stuff on top of cupboards or the like.
There is so much here buried in the Skeptiko podcasts (plus some inevitable dross), but even astral travel seems to be real (I just don't have the info at my fingertips!).
David
Hi David.
Some very interesting thoughts surface (or re-surface) in response to your post. So many, really, that it's probably impossible to go in all the directions, but I'll choose one or two. First of all, I am not at all saying that there isn't anomaly. No, no... I accept that there is anomalous information. However, I am of the opinion that this information can "package" itself in the form of an apparent deceased relative or spirit. But I don't really think there's a big difference in quality between a capable medium and a capable remote viewer, suggesting that they are really engaged in versions of the same thing.
I think that the individual and collective subconscious mind is more than capable of "benign deception" though. Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that it might be called its modus operandi. Not so much that everything in an NDE (or a mediumistic reading, or an astral travel report) is literally true, but it is emotionally and psychologically validating to *believe* it is true, swirled in with authentic nonlocal information,
When it comes to the aware study, I find that intriguing. I don't really buy into the "the dying wouldn't really be interested in the symbols" argument. Maybe not, but the deceased should be interested. Ask yourself why an afterlife would NOT want to disclose itself by such evidence, for all the suffering it might alleviate. No, I think there's something else going on there. Basically, I think there are three options.
1) You accept the argument that it was a "small sample size." Even with 2000 cardiac arrests, or whatever the number was, it is still awfully difficult to get a sufficient number of people even with raw experiences, so this point is well taken. However, I am discomfited by the almost uncanny way in which the evidence effectively shrank to zero when we set up a system with the potential for formal, unambiguous verification. Still, if the small sample size argument appeals to you, it's not entirely without merit.
2) Despite everything, I suppose it's technically possible that we don't get formal evidence of OBEs because they don't exist. I think it unlikely, but I can't deny the bare possibility.
3) And this is the option that intrigues me the most. I've been pondering it for some time. Basically, it is my suspicion that paranormal event (essentially ALL paranormal event...not just NDE out of body incidents) operate in what I'd call an "ontology of potential existence only." Here's what I mean. I think these phenomena exist, but I don't think that their nature is such that we are going to get unambiguous formal evidence for them. If it were really a straightforward matter, there should have been unambiguous evidence of out of body experiences DECADES ago. Something is up... for sure.
Continuing with #3. I see it as akin to the double slit experiment outcomes. Now, you might say, we get unambiguous formal demonstration of "anomalous behaviour" (the quantum state) in that experiment and others like it. Yes, but we do so only by having *ambiguous or incomplete information about the system* ,and that's my point here. When we attempt to FORCE completed formal knowledge of the anomaly, it collapses to the classical state, and now you have unambiguous evidence, but of an ordinary horse, not the unicorn. This can be stated in another way...
a: I think paranormal anomalies including OBEs "really exist" but
b: we aren't going to find unambiguous formal evidence for them, and the Aware Study is the latest symptom of this. Also,
c: one can have an ambiguous observation of an unambiguous state, or an unambiguous observation of an ambiguous state (as in the double slit example) but not both.
