3 ms·

Is there an amount of concordant eyewitness testimony that should count as evidence? If your answer to that is "no", you're not being reasonable. The courts of

Is there an amount of concordant eyewitness testimony that should count as evidence? If your answer to that is "no", you're not being reasonable. The courts of most countries would also disagree with you. This even takes into account the fact that "eyewitness testimony is bad"... Like sure, maybe if it's 10, but if it's 100 people all making extremely similar claims? 1000? 10,000? The NDE people often use language like "realer than what I thought was real". While some drugs can induce this too, drugs also give quite random experiences, while the NDE thing seems fairly well-structured with few exceptions. It also seems internally-consistent (as in, within the realm of itself and its claims about reality, it doesn't seem to violate its own rules). If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them? Have you heard of the Kalman filter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter Consider that every eyewitness can be mathematically treated as a "noisy sensor" (who might also be a bad actor via lying). What if we applied a Kalman filter to quantized claims made across thousands of self-claimed NDE experiencers? Might this be a way to quantify (and therefore bring into the realm of rationality) eyewitness testimony of this nature? There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)?

stvltvs 3y ago
I don't dispute that people have NDEs and that they sincerely believe what they say. The problem is that that kind of evidence cannot in principle support the continuity of consciousness after bodily disintegration because 1) the body is still intact and 2) they don't test the difference between experiences near death and those after death. There is no way for a person to know if what they experienced happened during a time that an outside observer could see no brain activity. To take another example, many people report the experience of waking up with a demon, visible or invisible, sitting on their chest. I've had this experience. Should we accept this eyewitness testimony at face value? Isn't the simpler, more naturalistic explanation of sleep paralysis more fitted to the evidence? https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-you-should-know-about-sleep-paralysis-and-sleep-demons https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-you-should-know-abou...
- pmarreck 3y ago
  I do believe most demon experiences are sleep paralysis. (I can't assert that all of them are, no more than I can assert with certainty without existing in every female body ever that reports of "female ejaculation" are just urine.) Regarding brain activity or lack thereof during an NDE, here's a perspective: https://old.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_confirmed_no_brain_activity/kbn80p3/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_conf... “In cardiac arrest, even neuronal action-potentials, the ultimate physical basis for coordination of neural activity between widely separated brain regions, are rapidly abolished (Kelly et al., 2007). Moreover, cells in the hippocampus, the region thought to be essential for memory formation, are especially vulnerable to the effects of anoxia (Vriens et al., 1996). In short, it is not credible to suppose that NDEs occurring under conditions of general anesthesia, let alone cardiac arrest, can be accounted for in terms of some hypothetical residual capacity of the brain to process and store complex information under those conditions.” “Michael Sabom, MD, a cardiologist in Atlanta, Georgia, monitored the brain waves of his patients using an electroencephalograph (EEG) and was able to show that some who had reported NDEs had been clinically dead, meaning they registered no electrical activity in their brain.” Most NDE's are associated with heart stoppages. And in fact, NDE's started to begin to be reported more after working resuscitation techniques became more fleshed-out.
  - stvltvs 3y ago
    My thought is that NDEs might occur before or after the cessation of neural activity. From a first person perspective, there would be no way to distinguish whether it happened when there was no neural activity. From an outside perspective, it would need to be a rigorous, carefully designed test to distinguish. If not properly designed, it would be easy to bias the results through unblinded participants, etc. I'm not aware of such a test being conducted?
    - pmarreck 3y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_confirmed_no_brain_activity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_conf...
mistermann 3y ago
> If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them? This is pure gold analogy, if you don't mind I am going to borrow it. > There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)? I believe Taylor Swift is a substantial glitch in the matrix, I wish I had something more insightful to say on the matter.

stvltvs 3y ago

I don't dispute that people have NDEs and that they sincerely believe what they say. The problem is that that kind of evidence cannot in principle support the continuity of consciousness after bodily disintegration because 1) the body is still intact and 2) they don't test the difference between experiences near death and those after death. There is no way for a person to know if what they experienced happened during a time that an outside observer could see no brain activity. To take another example, many people report the experience of waking up with a demon, visible or invisible, sitting on their chest. I've had this experience. Should we accept this eyewitness testimony at face value? Isn't the simpler, more naturalistic explanation of sleep paralysis more fitted to the evidence? https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-you-should-know-about-sleep-paralysis-and-sleep-demons https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-you-should-know-abou...

pmarreck 3y ago
I do believe most demon experiences are sleep paralysis. (I can't assert that all of them are, no more than I can assert with certainty without existing in every female body ever that reports of "female ejaculation" are just urine.) Regarding brain activity or lack thereof during an NDE, here's a perspective: https://old.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_confirmed_no_brain_activity/kbn80p3/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_conf... “In cardiac arrest, even neuronal action-potentials, the ultimate physical basis for coordination of neural activity between widely separated brain regions, are rapidly abolished (Kelly et al., 2007). Moreover, cells in the hippocampus, the region thought to be essential for memory formation, are especially vulnerable to the effects of anoxia (Vriens et al., 1996). In short, it is not credible to suppose that NDEs occurring under conditions of general anesthesia, let alone cardiac arrest, can be accounted for in terms of some hypothetical residual capacity of the brain to process and store complex information under those conditions.” “Michael Sabom, MD, a cardiologist in Atlanta, Georgia, monitored the brain waves of his patients using an electroencephalograph (EEG) and was able to show that some who had reported NDEs had been clinically dead, meaning they registered no electrical activity in their brain.” Most NDE's are associated with heart stoppages. And in fact, NDE's started to begin to be reported more after working resuscitation techniques became more fleshed-out.
- stvltvs 3y ago
  My thought is that NDEs might occur before or after the cessation of neural activity. From a first person perspective, there would be no way to distinguish whether it happened when there was no neural activity. From an outside perspective, it would need to be a rigorous, carefully designed test to distinguish. If not properly designed, it would be easy to bias the results through unblinded participants, etc. I'm not aware of such a test being conducted?
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_confirmed_no_brain_activity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_conf...

mistermann 3y ago

> If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them? This is pure gold analogy, if you don't mind I am going to borrow it. > There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)? I believe Taylor Swift is a substantial glitch in the matrix, I wish I had something more insightful to say on the matter.