4 ms·

Are you suggesting that their "souls" are actually leaving their bodies? Care to propose an experiment to verify that?

andrewflnr 11y ago
Well, it would be pretty simple to test if they have access to information "out of body" that they didn't before. Put them in the scanner or whatever, put out a card with a freshly-invented message, see if they remember it when they come out.
- carapace 11y ago
  My understanding is that OOB experiences where the person gets access to information that could not conceivably be related by their physical bodily senses are quite common. There seems to be a sort of "barrier" for many people who will absolutely refuse to believe evidence of this sort. It is really hard to "do science" to a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester. People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. YMMV (BTW, if you see your body in bed don't jump out the window, jump into your body.)
  - nradov 11y ago
    If it's easy to reproduce then why hasn't anyone reproduced it?
  - abritinthebay 11y ago
    Well.. then your understanding is rather wrong. Stories about those are quite common but actual verifiable or repeatable events? Those have yet to happen. > a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester This is synonymous with "made up".
  - lambda 11y ago
    > People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. So, have someone who is "open" to it go and view something that they haven't otherwise had a chance to perceive in person, then when they wake up tell the experimenter what it was. If it's easy to reproduce, then they should be able to do that, and it should be easy to verify that they had an out of the body experience. Instead, you just get anecdotes, of people repeating past experiences with no controls to blind it. Human memory is surprisingly faulty, people can fill in details later on in their memory, and so on. So it's very easy to think that you had a dream in which you saw something for the first time, and then later recognize it while you're awake; but it's also possible that you brain just filled in the memory when you saw it later. Or maybe you had seen it in the past but didn't have conscious recollection. And so on. Simply hearing people say that they had OOB experiences in which they saw things that they never saw in person is not particularly credible.
  - carapace 11y ago
    It's pointless to argue, but here's another anecdote for the files... One day, out of the blue, I had a vivid daydream. James Brown lay dead on the floor and three Gospel singers were wailing over him in the old way, mourning and crying out. That was December 24th, 2006, and I can be so certain because the next day was the day James Brown died. It so happens that I am a huge James Brown fan. It would have been very hard for me to deal with his passing but some grace granted me a tiny kindness and eased my sorrow. Now, these are incontrovertible facts, however subjective, and admitting such doesn't mean we must now believe in astrology or anything like that. But how could you expect to reproduce something like this in a lab? Nevertheless an attitude that dismisses such extremely common incidents seems to me to be unscientific.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - abritinthebay 11y ago
      Given that you're a huge James Brown fan, and that he wasn't exactly well for a while before his death... ... I mean this isn't exactly "I dreamed the social security number of my wife who I hadn't met yet" level of coincidence is it?

Well, it would be pretty simple to test if they have access to information "out of body" that they didn't before. Put them in the scanner or whatever, put out a card with a freshly-invented message, see if they remember it when they come out.

carapace 11y ago
My understanding is that OOB experiences where the person gets access to information that could not conceivably be related by their physical bodily senses are quite common. There seems to be a sort of "barrier" for many people who will absolutely refuse to believe evidence of this sort. It is really hard to "do science" to a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester. People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. YMMV (BTW, if you see your body in bed don't jump out the window, jump into your body.)
- nradov 11y ago
  If it's easy to reproduce then why hasn't anyone reproduced it?
- abritinthebay 11y ago
  Well.. then your understanding is rather wrong. Stories about those are quite common but actual verifiable or repeatable events? Those have yet to happen. > a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester This is synonymous with "made up".
- lambda 11y ago
  > People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. So, have someone who is "open" to it go and view something that they haven't otherwise had a chance to perceive in person, then when they wake up tell the experimenter what it was. If it's easy to reproduce, then they should be able to do that, and it should be easy to verify that they had an out of the body experience. Instead, you just get anecdotes, of people repeating past experiences with no controls to blind it. Human memory is surprisingly faulty, people can fill in details later on in their memory, and so on. So it's very easy to think that you had a dream in which you saw something for the first time, and then later recognize it while you're awake; but it's also possible that you brain just filled in the memory when you saw it later. Or maybe you had seen it in the past but didn't have conscious recollection. And so on. Simply hearing people say that they had OOB experiences in which they saw things that they never saw in person is not particularly credible.
- carapace 11y ago
  It's pointless to argue, but here's another anecdote for the files... One day, out of the blue, I had a vivid daydream. James Brown lay dead on the floor and three Gospel singers were wailing over him in the old way, mourning and crying out. That was December 24th, 2006, and I can be so certain because the next day was the day James Brown died. It so happens that I am a huge James Brown fan. It would have been very hard for me to deal with his passing but some grace granted me a tiny kindness and eased my sorrow. Now, these are incontrovertible facts, however subjective, and admitting such doesn't mean we must now believe in astrology or anything like that. But how could you expect to reproduce something like this in a lab? Nevertheless an attitude that dismisses such extremely common incidents seems to me to be unscientific.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - abritinthebay 11y ago
    Given that you're a huge James Brown fan, and that he wasn't exactly well for a while before his death... ... I mean this isn't exactly "I dreamed the social security number of my wife who I hadn't met yet" level of coincidence is it?