Topic: Why I'm an atheist - page 84. (Read 89022 times)

He didn’t identify the pictures, he described the defibrillator machine noise. But that’s not very impressive since many people know what goes on in an emergency room setting from seeing recreations on television."[130][131]

You ignore the science behind the timeline of awareness during anoxia when presented with it, therefore you are irrational by definition.

Your concept of death bears no relation to the timeline of awareness during anoxia and the medical fact that awareness is impossible if the brain is nonfunctional. So for the purposes of our discussion of the cardiac arrest study, your concept bears no relation to the facts, it is a non-sequitor.

Awareness without brain function is important because it falsifies materialism and its "awareness from eternal nothing" (OP is a materialist).

You are misinformed: Even the skeptics agree that the survival hypothesis is falsifiable; these guys are saying exactly what I and other skeptics have been saying about the tests that would be required:
https://books.google.com/books?id=dlRuBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA227&lpg=PA227&dq=survival+hypothesis+falsifiable&source=bl&ots=sI-MDSpa86&sig=iQglG33Jvrpx_oVmY1U4jOPLRHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG6pmp9LLMAhUEsYMKHUpeCKsQ6AEIJTAB#v=onepage&q=survival%20hypothesis%20falsifiable&f=false

In 2001, Sam Parnia and colleagues investigated out of body claims by placing figures on suspended boards facing the ceiling, not visible from the floor. Parnia wrote "anybody who claimed to have left their body and be near the ceiling during resuscitation attempts would be expected to identify those targets. If, however, such perceptions are psychological, then one would obviously not expect the targets to be identified."[123] The philosopher Keith Augustine, who examined Parnia's study, has written that all target identification experiments have produced negative results.[124] Psychologist Chris French wrote regarding the study "unfortunately, and somewhat atypically, none of the survivors in this sample experienced an OBE."[125]

In the autumn of 2008, 25 UK and US hospitals began participation in a study, coordinated by Sam Parnia and Southampton University known as the AWARE study (AWAreness during REsuscitation). Following on from the work of Pim van Lommel in the Netherlands, the study aims to examine near-death experiences in 1,500 cardiac arrest survivors and so determine whether people without a heartbeat or brain activity can have documentable out-of-body experiences.[126] As part of the study Parnia and colleagues have investigated out of body claims by using hidden targets placed on shelves that could only be seen from above.[126] Parnia has written "if no one sees the pictures, it shows these experiences are illusions or false memories".[126]

In 2014 Parnia issued a statement indicating that the first phase of the project has been completed and the results are undergoing peer review for publication in a medical journal.[127] No subjects saw the images mounted out of sight according to Parnia's early report of the results of the study at an American Heart Association meeting in November 2013. Only two out of the 152 patients reported any visual experiences, and one of them described events that could be verified.[128]

On October 6, 2014 the results of the study were published in the journal Resuscitation. Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDEs. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBEs with explicit recall of 'seeing' and 'hearing' events. One case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest.[129] According to Caroline Watt "The one ‘verifiable period of conscious awareness’ that Parnia was able to report did not relate to this objective test. Rather, it was a patient giving a supposedly accurate report of events during his resuscitation. He didn’t identify the pictures, he described the defibrillator machine noise. But that’s not very impressive since many people know what goes on in an emergency room setting from seeing recreations on television."[130][131]

If you kept talking with me, and I had the necessary patience, I would make you an atheist.

Something on the OP made you think

and you didn't really like what that thought forced you to conclude.

Are you trying to convince me or yourself?

I disagree with you, and now I'm 'brainless'? Sigh.

Your concept of death is different to mine. If someone is dead, they don't get up again to tell you about it. If they do, they weren't dead. Death is final.

Discussing what people see in a death-like state is uninteresting, unless someone can perform a replicable peer reviewed experiment that can prove something important is happening.

I haven't seen anything like the level of proof I want and that I apply to all aspects of my life, so it's just not interesting for me.

Even a falsifiable hypothesis would be a good start, but AFAICT you don't even have that.

Correct. I just authored the words that I used without copying them from somewhere else. I made it up, although someone else might have used the exact same words in the exact same order somewhere else at some other time.

The thing that I didn't make up is that there is a number - maybe 10⁴⁰ - that if the odds against are greater than 10⁴⁰ scientifically, it is considered an impossibility by scientists. Now, it is true that I don't remember the number, but you can find it if you search for it. It might not be 10⁴⁰.

OP is no longer responding to me because of the impressive evidence that I have presented

It's impossible to know whether or not awareness ends at death,

and pointless to argue about since what happens after irrevocable death is unknown.

This would not explain cases of longer duration, for example the patient in AWARE had perceptions which lasted at least 2 minutes and were verified by medical staff.

You just totally made that up. Unless you have a link for that? Dictionary.com won't be your friend here, I think.

OP still has not answered how HE KNOWS that awareness ends at physical death, he only tells us to "face it" as if HE KNOWS it were true. Why won't OP face the results of the AWARE study which have verified an instance of awareness after physical death?

Now I have supplied this discussion with the context it needed; hopefully you (organofcorti) can help me to get the OP to answer for his absurd claims!

It comes down to deduction, and you and I are already in agreement about everything having a cause:

Like I mentioned, "The idea that everything in the world has a meaning [reason] is an exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause, on which rests all of science. It follows immediately that our worldly existence, since it has in itself at most a very dubious meaning, can only be means to the end of another existence."

This line of reasoning refutes the OP's claim that humanity's true home is "eternal nothing".

Helpful resource for precise thinkers: http://kevincarmody.com/math/goedel.html

What is that number again? Is it 10 to the fortieth? If it hasn't happened in 10 to the fortieth (or whatever that number is again) it is impossible, scientifically. Look it up. Standard high school science.

You've just asked for a very long, involved and illogical and self-contradictory post from a forum member well-known for such. Learn from my mistakes and don't bother arguing with him/her.

Has it been falsified? I haven't seen that. I'm not even sure how you could come up with an experiment that could prove things either way.

As you say, both his and your standpoints are essentially philosophical in nature. This is probably why you'll never be able to agree -- neither side is falsifiable, so it comes down your personal preferences.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You might be able to find evidence of absence some other way, but simply never having noticed something before does not prove that something does not exist.

Come on! This is high school stuff. Why are you even pretending to argue against it?

Now you want to throw out all science theory, right?

The odds! Even science has an upper limit for the odds. If it hasn't happened in one out of some-great-big-number, even science says it doesn't exist.

Your statement "NOBODY has seen even one thing come from nothing" as evidence of the impossibility of something coming from nothing, is invalid.  Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Never having seen something is not proof of non-existence. There are many much more convincing arguments that that.

You talk so silly. Everybody has seen multitudes of things that have come from other things. Yet, NOBODY has seen even one thing come from nothing.

If science focused on turning this into a law, it would become one of the greatest scientific laws of all. The reason science doesn't focus on it to make it a law is, it is so extremely apparent. It would be like saying liquid water is wet. Nobody makes "liquid water is wet" into a scientific law, because everyone knows it, not because it couldn't be easily made into a scientific law.