Do you believe in ghosts?

Just in general Creami I haven't been sitting there for months going, grr, that Creami, gonna get her in forums lol...just had issue with that comment being made.

Boo!

Chip! Yeesh, get it right. They believed it was a wooden bowl. *rolls eyes* lol

Wheew. I must agree with Taco, you just explained my whole dictionary post. Thanks Chip

LOL Katja, next time you see me at the G, feel free to spank me

*copies and pastes this to huge billboard to hang in the G*

If I can show a large majority of life after death experiences are almost identical( going to a bright light, the light a warm, caring entity of great knowledge and wisdom), transending cultural beliefs, would you agree there might be a chance there is life after life? Or would you change your arguement to say it's part of a natural process of dying(halucinations caused by the brain dying), that it's common because we are all human?

I'd go with the latter. The similarity of experience described by people who've had near death experiences suggests that biological processes are at work rather than anything supernatural. We all share the same biology but not the same mythology.

Then I suppose it would be pointless to show you that the experiences are almost identical.

Glad I asked before spending time to prove it for you

Thanks

I'd be extremely surprised if they weren't.

Nor the same "reality".

-Ghoti

Actually, it's a "hallucination" caused by fear. Identical experiences have been reported by people in situations where death was imminent but the person was not actually dying. Last moment changes in the situation allowed these people to live and tell us about thier experiences, which include watching themselves from above, going down a tunnel toward a light, and even being comforted by a "greater being" of love and wisdom.

Interestingly, identical experiences are also reported by people with accute anxiety disorders.

The out of body experience is known as "depersonalization", a mechanism by which the mind can alleviate the stress of the situation by acting as an impersonal observer. And the tunnel experience is thought by many to be a combination of depersonalization and the effects of constricted vision effects, and the feelings of being comforted are as often attributed to our insticts for being cared for as children.

There's no proof one way or the other, but this set of theorems does well enough for now. Occam's Razor (which says "do not multiply entities unnessesarily" suggests that as we do not presently need and actual soul or superbeing to explain these experiences, there's currently no need to think that either exists.

The technical term is "scaring the bejesus out of someone." If there was no bejesus to scare out, then they wouldn't see themselves from above. This proves that you don't need to look to religion to find Jesus, just bejesus.

Well, you had said "Find me a life after death belief from anywhere in the world at any time in history that is seperate from that culture's religious belief system, or a throwback to another culture's religious belief system. I doubt there is one."

So I thought showing you it isn't cultural, you might change your mind, but then I remembered the same discussion I had in 1996 with an atheist, and after much research I was able to show the experiences are very similar, regardless of upbringing or even if the person was an atheist. He then changed the argument to the one I brought up to you.

That would seem logical, until people who were clinically dead in the hospital are able to recite the conversations of doctors in other rooms or even on different floors in the hospital after being revived.

I can do that, but I don't see dead people.

Humans, when presented with a lack of hard evidence, draw the best conclusions they can.

It's what we do.



It's what pigeons do, too.

The following is what a representative sample of pigeons came to believe, when food was presented at regular intervals *regardless* of what the birds did.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/


Do not try this at home. Animals may become dangerous when their core beliefs are challenged.

Edit: - thank you for the link correction

Got a little happy there with the forward slashes. :0

I've yet to see documentation of this. And I've looked quite a bit. Nothing but anecdotes.

Anecdote? If it's verified by the doctors who were speaking in the other room, is it an anecdote?

If it was verified by the doctor's, in several cases, would that change your mind about the possibility of life after death?

Yes, if they fail to capture enough detail in thier obeservations, which just about everyone does. This sort of thing needs an independant researcher to really get past "anecdote". I would like it if it were taken seriously enough to call on one when the opportunity arrose.

No. Like I said, people tend to miss the grit of things in these cases. But if it were fully observed in several instances, then it would start to change my mind. Fully observed over a long period of time, then most definately.

There are some very good books on the subject of life after death. One author converted his views after doing his own study. If you find the time to read the books "Life After Death" and "Life After Life" by Raymond Moody( http://www.lifeafterlife.com/ ), it will give you the perspective of an atheist faced with the fact of life after the body dies.

It happens. By naming it you can try to dismiss it but it's just people reporting what's going on.

My own experience wasn't anything remarkable. I just popped out and got a really intimate look at a corner of the room.

The trouble with these things is they do most often happen while people are busy with something else, they don't really grasp what's happening, and often trauma is involved. Collecting data for some scientist to verify is generally the furthest thing from your mind.

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Well, I should stop playing to the cats here. It's a little bit silly to keep reading how people assert "there's no such thing" then when others offer personal experience with said thing, it's written off because it wasn't peer reviewed or something. People experience different things in life. Just because you haven't seen it yourself doesn't make them delusional. It just means you've missed out.

Definitely real, being a ghost hunter and all, I've experianced them.

I've had two OBEs. Neither particularly remarkable either.
And this is a mistake a lot of people make with science. It's named as a reference only, not to "dismiss" anything. What I posted about depersonalization should be considered only as "what's been carefully observed so far, and the theory that fits the observations best so far".

That "so far" is what's important. Nothing's "zipped up" with good science. We need to know better than to belive we know anything with absolute certainty. It must all be subject to change as we observe more about our universe.

"So far" there's nothing that really suggests the existence of a "soul" or any part of a human personality that continues after death. If such a thing does exist, then good science will find it. Eventually.